In early November 2012,
while international attention was focused on election irregularities, the
ruling majority took the opportunity to pass a previously
rejected version of a`highly dangerous Law on National Referendums. On July 4, with mass protest throughout the country over adoption of the
contentious State Language Policy Act, a bill was passed which
removed around a third of all public procurement from tender procedure.
The situation on April
4 was different in that all eyes were certainly focused on the Verkhovna
Rada. As much as they could be, since “parliament,” we were supposed to
believe, had split in two. The opposition had been blocking the
parliamentary tribune over the ruling majority’s refusal to call long overdue
elections in Kyiv.
To avoid disadvantageous elections, but break the
blockade, a meeting of some members of the Party of the Regions, communists and
officially non-affiliated members of parliament decided to hold a “parliamentary session” at the
parliamentary committee premises on Bankova Street.
We may or may not believe
in the physical presence of at least 237 MPs who supposedly attended this
session and voted for various motions, Even without clear infringements
of procedural norms, there is also the fundamental problem that members of the
parliamentary opposition were physically prevented from
attending this event, call it what you will.
Yet we are informed by Serhiy Larin, deputy head of the President’s Administration, that if the laws thus “adopted”
are passed to President Viktor Yanukovych in the proper manner, he will sign them.
Attention to what the MPs
from the ruling majority got up to on April 4 is therefore imperative.
The communists present
recalled their traditional roots and voted against a Verkhovna Rada Resolution
on commemorating the 80th anniversary of Holodomor [the man-made famine] of
1932/1933 and also refused to observe a minute’s silence for victims of
Holodomor
They recalled their new
affiliations through the other laws concerned, most particularly those on
fighting corruption. Oleksy Khmara, head of Transparency International in
Ukraine, has
listed the main laws with ramifications for fighting (or fueling)
corruption in Ukraine.
These include adding a
“qualification requirement” to the public procurement system which, as he
points out, can easily be used to knock out any inconvenient bidders by saying
that they aren’t compliant.
The Health Ministry, for
example, will be able to legally reject foreign producers of medicines because
the latter don’t have production facilities in Ukraine. That will either
mean that medicines become as much as 10 times more expensive because of the
need for intermediaries to organize packaging in Ukraine, or those medicines
which are available will become dangerously low quality since their producers
have an effective monopoly.
Three out of four
anti-corruption draft laws drawn up by the government were scrubbed, being sent
back for “reworking”. These included №2033 on
criminalizing corrupt acts presently subject only to administrative fines. All
four were prepared in implementation of Ukraine’s obligations before the EU on
fighting corruption and this new delay is another critical blow to chances for
signing of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement
The history of Ukraine’s
failure to fight corruption precedes the current President. On the other
hand one of the norms which those present on Bankova St on 4 April hope to
delay indefinitely – on liability for legal entities – was in the 2009
anti-corruption legislation. This was cast aside after Yanukovych came to power
supposedly because his regime was going to tackle corruption with renewed
vigour.
As was demonstrated on April 4.
Halya Coynash is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. The story can be read here.
