Hundreds of activists on July 4 held a rally in front of the Constitutional Court to protest against the potential cancelation of the 2014 lustration law on the firing of top officials who served ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. The demonstrators also supported the 2015 decommunization law on the dismantlement of Soviet era monuments and the renaming of places with Soviet names.
The Constitutional Court considered the issue on July 4 and was initially expected to make a final decision on lustration and decommunization. However, the court delayed considering the issue.
The rally was attended by representatives of the nationalist Svoboda and National Corps parties, ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party and singer Vyatoslav Vakarchuk’s Voice party.
Two officials who would benefit from the lustration law’s cancelation are President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Bohdan’s Chief of Staff Oleksiy Dniprov. They are banned from holding their jobs by the wording of the lustration law but argue that they hold them legally.
The Justice Ministry’s lustration department has also accused Zelensky’s predecessor Poroshenko of sabotaging the lustration law by refusing to fire Dniprov, ex-Kyiv Oblast Governor Oleksandr Tereshchuk, ex-Kirovohrad Oblast Governor Serhiy Kuzmenko, ex-Luhansk Oblast Governor Yuriy Harbuz, the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) former top investigator, Grigory Ostafiychuk, and Oleg Valendyuk, ex-head of the SBU’s Kyiv Oblast branch. Poroshenko has denied the accusations of sabotage.
