The longer that Hanna Herman speaks for President Viktor Yanukovych in an official capacity, the more damage she will do to his administration’s credibility – which is quite low now anyway.
Long after the claim has been discredited, the presidential aide keeps on insisting that criminal investigations have been launched against 478 high-ranking government officials since Yanukovych took power in 2010.
Herman most recently renewed the questionable claim to counter growing international condemnation of what appear to be politically motivated criminal prosecutions of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other officials who worked for her.
After defending the administration’s record at a June 14 event in Kyiv organized by the U.S.-based Freedom House human rights organization, ex-Deputy Prime Minister Hryroriy Nemyria goaded her into providing proof.
She pulled out a five-page document, gave it to Freedom House executive director David J. Kramer and promptly left the meeting.
The Security Services of Ukraine document doesn’t show that 478 administration loyalists or top current officials are under investigation.
Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavyrynovych and presidential chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin made similar claims earlier this year.
When pressed, the general prosecutor refuses to name names, arguing that the suspects have not been found guilty yet.
This is poppycock. The names of criminal suspects are routinely bandied about by officials when doing so serves their interests.
Moreover, if arrests have been made or criminal charges filed, the state should disclose the names and reasons for depriving people of liberty.
Law enforcers routinely flout human rights in this nation, including arbitrary arrests, selective prosecution and excessive pre-trial jailing of people.
At the same event where Herman defended the administration’s record, numerous human rights activists painted a different and – in our view – more accurate picture of a democratic nation creeping back into authoritarianism.
The Yanukovych administration has monopolized political power and is persecuting political opponents while ignoring corruption in its own ranks.
The public continues to be kept in the dark about government favors to insiders, including shady privatizations of state assets and favors for friends of the Party of Regions.
The full extent of shady deals, including dirty state procurements and near-monopolization of various industries, may never be known.
Even Yanukovych, while chairing an anti-corruption meeting earlier this month, admitted the nation is looted of billions of dollars each year.
He just didn’t say by whom.
Amid signs that the presidential Party of Regions intends to stay in power at all costs, human rights activists and diplomats have put the administration on notice that the 2012 parliamentary elections had better be clean, transparent and fair.
Until the administration comes clean about criminal investigations and almost everything else within its ever-expanding purview, it will be hard to take any of its representatives – especially Herman – seriously.
