The election of a new human rights ombudsman has come to a standstill in Ukraine.
It’s been almost two months since Ukrainian parliament, stuck in political backroom deals, failed to appoint the new parliamentary commissioner for human rights at the scheduled date of June 6 after the tenure of the current ombudsman Valeriya Lutkovska ended in April.
But even if lawmakers appointed one of their three candidates, it likely wouldn’t have helped Ukraine’s human rights situation, since all of the candidates were politically biased and lacked human rights protection experience. The activists demand to launch the new transparent competition with local and international human rights watchdogs being involved.
The process has been suspended until early September, when the Verkhovna Rada gets back from the summer break.
However, human rights activists haven’t got any chances to relax. They demand that Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko doesn’t sign the law, passed by parliament just before the lawmakers went on the break, saying one of its amendments will politicize the ombudsman election even more.
Bohdan Kryklyvenko, head of the human rights ombudsman office, told the Kyiv Post that the independent ombudsman is especially important for the country right now, considering Russia’s war.
“It’s very important for the prisoners and the captives to know that there is an institution that really cares about their problems,” he said.
Candidates
Ukrainian lawmakers submitted three candidates for the human rights ombudsman’s position.
The parliament was supposed to choose one through the secret untraceable voting method, where each lawmaker writes down the name of the candidate on a ballot, on June 6. They canceled the vote though because the National Agency on Corruption Prevention needed more time to check up on the candidates, parliament’s Speaker Andriy Parubiy said.
According to Tetiana Pechonchyk, chair of the board of Human Rights Information Center, the real reason might have been that they realized that there weren’t enough votes for any of the candidates.
Petro Poroshenko Bloc, the biggest faction in parliament, nominated its lawmaker Serhiy Alekseev. The People’s Front party, Poroshenko Bloc’s only partner in the parliamentary coalition, also nominated its lawmaker, Lyudmila Denysova.
The third candidate, Andriy Mamalyga, was suggested by the Radical Party. He is a lawyer and the head of the Ukrainian non-government organization that helps veterans of the war in Donbas.
Ukrainian legislation requires that the candidates for the ombudsman position have high moral standards and human rights protection experience, however, does not elaborate on what kind of experience is enough.
According to Pechonchyk, neither of the suggested candidates has sufficient experience.
All of the candidates told the Kyiv Post that they consider themselves to have loads of necessary human rights experience.
Denysova said that, besides working as a lawyer, her position as the social policy minister in the governments of Yuliya Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk gave her a lot of human rights experience. Now, being the chairman of the social policy, employment and pensions committee in parliament, she “protects social guarantees of residents of the country, eliminates pressure on business and liberalizes the work of state bodies, and prevents any type of discrimination in all spheres of Ukrainians’ life.”
Alexeiev said that much of his human rights experience comes from being the vice-chairman of the parliamentary committee on legal policy and justice. In this position he co-authors bills focused on the protection of human rights and has already “put together several hundreds of appeals regarding human rights violations.”
Mamalyga told the Kyiv Post that the complaints of human rights activists that he didn’t have enough human rights experience came as a shock to him.
“Certain organizations have monopolized the human rights market,” he said. “What those organizations do is monitor that human rights are upheld, and only some of them are actually engaged in protecting human rights. To the best of my knowledge, those organizations that actually protect human rights, not just monitor, are headed by lawyers. That’s why I was very surprised to hear (from them) that ‘well, you’re a lawyer, but you’re not really a human rights activist’.”
Mamalyga credits his human rights experience to the past 19 years of working as a lawyer and specializing in criminal matters. He considers himself to be an even better fit for the ombudsman position than the current ombudsman Lutkovska.
Political control
However, the situation has received the new development recently, with human rights activists ringing the alarm bells over the law that was approved by the Verkhovna Rada on July 13, and has already been sent to Poroshenko. If he signs it, lawmakers will be able to vote for the ombudsman not through the secret voting, but openly.
In their open letter to Poroshenko, published on July 21, heads of nine Ukraine’s human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Kharkiv Human Rights Group, urge him not to let the further politicizing of the ombudsman election.
Pechonchyk explained that the open voting allows factions’ leaders to control how their lawmakers vote, which creates a tool for pressure on them.
“But the ombudsman has to be apolitical,” she said.
Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, said that at this point he wishes that at least someone would already be chosen for the position.
“Since those who deal with human rights today refused (to run for the ombudsman position) and since there are no other candidates, I think that (the parliament) needs to choose at least someone who wants to hold this position,” he said.
