Ukrainian delegates to the Council of Europe headed to Strasbourg for Jan. 25-29 meetings hoping to mitigate the human-rights organization’s new, harsh view of Ukraine’s failure to live up to its promises.
A stinging report by CE rapporteurs Hanne Severinsen from Denmark and Tunne Kelam from Estonia was adopted by the CE’s Legal Issues and Human Rights Committee in December. The report exhaustively lists areas of concern and recommends that if many issues are not resolved by June, the CE’s Parliamentary Assembly should annul Ukraine’s credentials, which would lead to Ukraine’s suspension from the organization.
Suspension from the CE would dash Ukraine’s hopes of gaining associate membership in the European Union, which relies on the CE to monitor applicant states’ policies on human rights and commitment to rule of law. Even the pending threat of suspension is likely to convince the EU to shelve Ukraine’s application.
The January session of the council’s monitoring committee will discuss and vote on the report, according to Severinsen.
Ukrainian CE delegate Serhy Holovaty pointed out, the Ukrainian authorities have only fulfilled one of their formal obligations to the CE made when Ukraine gained membership in 1995 – to pass the constitution in 1996.
At that time Ukraine also pledged to adopt within a year a new criminal and civil code, an act on the protection of human rights, an act on legal and judicial reform, and a new law on political parties. Parliament was expected to sign within a year and ratify within three a law abolishing the death penalty. Four years later, none of those things have been done.
Severinsen and Kelam’s report demands that those five specific commitments be honored by June if Ukraine is to keep its membership.
However, Severinsen said that discussions with the Ukrainian delegation at the January session were likely to result in amendments to that section of the report, ‘some [of which] I can support.’
‘We have said [in the report] we want the assembly to consider in June whether there has been progress in these particular five areas,’ she said. ‘If there is substantial improvement in a lot of areas, then we can recommend that we don’t go into taking away credentials.’
Severinsen said that although the requirements Ukraine must fulfill may be amended, the June deadline would hold.
In previous years, Severinsen said, Ukraine has simply procrastinated instead of taking action, but she was positive that this time delegates were taking the CE more seriously.
‘The meeting today was the first where you could say that now they are beginning to understand what it’s all about,’ she said. ‘There had been a tendency when they would say, just extend the date and everything will be fine. Now it seems that some are actually willing to do something.’
The CE certainly seems to be taking Ukraine seriously. Although countries have been expelled since the CE was formed in 1949, this is the first time a report has included a time limit and a recommendation.
Severinsen said she would personally request that the newly elected president of the CE Parliamentary Assembly, Lord Russell-Johnston, visit Ukraine to talk with President Leonid Kuchma.
One indication that Ukraine is also taking the CE more seriously is the Russian CE delegation that arrived in Kyiv on Friday to consult with its Ukrainian counterparts. Russia is likely to face exactly the same issues with the CE later this year and appeared to be seeking some solidarity.
However, going by Ukrainian news reports in the week before the January session, much of the Council’s report and recommendations appear to have fallen on deaf ears. Until last year, Ukraine’s failure to abolish the death penalty dominated relations with the CE.
Ukraine executed 212 people between November 1995 and March 1997, and although a moratorium is now in place, courts continue to hand down death sentences, sentencing 146 prisoners last year – actually an increase from the previous year.
Severinsen’s and Kelam’s report places the death penalty well down on a list of factors indicating Ukraine’s lack of commitment to democracy and rule of law. But statements from the presidential administration and the head of the Russian delegation continued to focus exclusively on the death penalty.
Interfax reported presidential press secretary Oleksandr Martynenko’s announcement that president Kuchma had done his utmost to solve the death-penalty issue and that ‘everything now depends on Verkhovna Rada decisions.’
Meanwhile, the head of the Russian delegation, Sergei Glotov, was quoted by Interfax as saying that Ukraine’s problems with the CE stem from the death-penalty issue.
‘In general our goal is to make the Council of Europe stop focusing on such issues and concentrate on the social problems,’ he said.
‘We would very much like this to be not a discussion only about the death penalty,’ Severinsen said.
The CE is more concerned with abuses of power, she said, in particular with cases of media intimidation and repression, rigged elections, and the illegal interference of the central executive in local government in Odessa, Kyiv and Sevastopol.
The report refers to Ukraine’s unfulfilled promises to reform the prosecutor’s office to comply with CE standards and to transfer prison administration from the Interior Ministry to the Justice Ministry, and expresses concern over the independence of the judiciary. It also refers to alleged torture and ill-treatment by the police and the failure to enfranchise the Crimean Tatars.
The death-penalty debate is one in which the Ukrainian authorities can claim the support of ordinary citizens against the CE. Public polls tend to show that most people oppose its abolition.
The recent case of accused mass murderer Anatoly Onopriyenko, charged with the murder of 52 people, has fueled support for capital punishment. Kuchma declared he would request special dispensation to execute Onopriyenko if he is found guilty.
Focus on the death penalty has obscured the CE’s other demands, which are more directly critical of the behavior of parliament and government in hindering democracy.
‘The Ukrainian government and Ukrainian authorities want to present that the main issue is the death penalty,’ Holovaty said. ‘This is a game of the mass media and the authorities. They know that only one issue, the death penalty, is very sensitive to the public. They can’t afford to say that Ukraine is accused of all other issues; with elections, with self-government in Odessa and Kyiv, with mass media repression.
‘The death penalty concerns only some hundreds of people. But the right to a fair trial affects thousands. Democracy affects everyone,’ Holovaty said.
Holovaty, who is also a member of the CE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, said he was preparing his own report to present to the CE. He was not sanguine on Ukraine’s chances to ingratiate itself this time.
‘Some of [the Ukrainian degates] will try to justify themselves, but I’m not sure they will be successful,’ he said. ‘The death penalty is not yet solved but I think by June it will somehow be sorted out. Nothing else will be solved.’
The assembly’s resolution has also been relayed to the European Parliament, the OSCE, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities in Europe, ‘and invites them to take its provisions into account in their cooperation with Ukraine,’ according to the CE’s resolution.
Severinsen said it will be Ukrainian citizens who lose if Ukraine were suspended.
‘Ukrainian people would lose the opportunity to have human-rights protection and their right to a legal framework,’ she said.
