Members of parliament Iryna Farion and Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn are suggesting a prison term of up to three years for those who intentionally push Ukrainian out of official use, including in publicly funded kindergartens, for example. The same prison term would apply for those who publicly insult Ukrainian.
If the harm to Ukrainian comes from a public official, with use of Internet or media, or is done by a group of individuals, the potential prison term increases to five years. If the actions caused “severe damage” to Ukrainian, the suggested prison term goes up to seven years – the same as the minimum for premeditated murder.
In their explanatory note, the two deputies say that encroachment on Ukrainian language “warps Constitutional requirements and carries a real threat to national interests of Ukraine. These actions should be qualified as an assault on the constitutional system.”
Svoboda’s original party program contains a provision that suggests criminal responsibility for limitation of Ukrainian, so the new draft law should not really be a surprise. When Svoboda was a marginal and regional ultra-right party, it did not matter so much what it thought. There were hopes that once it got into parliamentary, party leaders would take their stupid and dangerous ideas and become more constructive.
It’s clear that’s not going to happen. Again and again, Svoboda’s keep showing that they are prepared to act contrary to national interests. One case in point is its stubborn and ignorant resistance to the development of shale gas in Ukraine that could make the nation less dependent on Russian gas imports.
Fortunately, the chances that this language imprisonment bill will be approved by the Verkhovna Rada are zero. But Svoboda is increasingly proving itself as an unworthy partner of its other opposition partners, Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna and Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform.
Whether in power or in opposition, the impulse to punish people for their thoughts or speech is still pervasive among those in power. Just as First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin recently equated criticism of him and other public officials with libel and defamation and now wants it punished as a crime, Svoboda wants to make people criminals for the language they don’t use. Under both ideas, democracy seems further away than ever.
