The Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal on June 25 ruled in favor of ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party, allowing it to run in the July 21 snap parliamentary election.
The decision follows Saakashvili’s long-running quest to return to Ukrainian politics after being deported from Ukraine amid a conflict with then President Petro Poroshenko in February 2018. He returned to Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelensky restored his Ukrainian citizenship in May.
The court upheld a lawsuit filed by Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces against the Central Election Commission’s June 23 refusal to register the party for the election.
The court thus canceled the commission’s decision. The court ruling can still be appealed by the Central Election Commission.
According to the documents submitted by the party to the commission, the Movement of New Forces’ governing council on May 8 summoned a congress of the party scheduled for June 10. The congress delegated candidates for the parliamentary election.
The Central Election Commission said that the council could not have made the decision on May 8 because the early elections were called on May 21. The commission cited this as the reason for rejecting the party’s application for registration.
The commission’s representative in court also claimed that the party congress did not comply with the party’s statute. The representative could not explain, however, which specific clause of the statute the party had allegedly violated.
He also claimed that the party had not posted an official announcement of its congress on its site.
Lawyers’ position
Saakashvili’s lawyers said that the party had made a misprint regarding the date of the governing council meeting, which was actually held on June 5.
They argued that, according to Ukrainian law and recent legal practice, misprints and technical errors cannot be grounds for refusing to register candidates.
Saakashvili’s lawyers also said that Saakashvili and his legal team had not been warned about the Central Election Commission meeting on June 23 and had been effectively denied the right to attend.
The commission claimed that an announcement of its meeting had been published on its site on June 23. However, Yevhen Radchenko, a deputy head of the commission, told the Kyiv Post he did not know if Saakashvili’s team had been warned about the meeting.
Saakashvili strikes back
Saakashvili said that his political enemies – Poroshenko and the People’s Front party – were behind the decision to reject his party’s bid for registration.
“The old system is resisting and it’s afraid of us a lot, but we’re not afraid of it,” he said on Facebook. “We’ll destroy the system eventually.”
The 16-member Central Election Commission includes six representatives from the Poroshenko Bloc. According to different estimates, Poroshenko controlled eight to 10 members when he was president. The People’s Front has three representatives on the commission.
Tetiana Slipachuk, head of the commission, was delegated to the Central Election Commission by the People’s Will faction, which often voted in the interests of Poroshenko’s administration. In 2016 Slipachuk was delegated by Poroshenko to the commission for selecting the leadership of the State Investigation Bureau.
Meanwhile, Slipachuk and Oleksiy Filatov, former deputy chief of staff for Poroshenko, used to be partners at law firm Vasyl Kysyl and Partners.
Slipachuk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also been accused of ties to ex-Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky, who has denied promoting her candidacy for the commission’s head. In 2015 she praised Hranovsky in a comment under a Facebook post.
Saakashvili’s deportation
The commission’s decision follows a long history of what Saakashvili believes to be political persecution of himself and his supporters.
Poroshenko invited Saakashvili to Ukraine and appointed him as governor of Odesa Oblast in 2015. However, he deprived Saakashvili of his citizenship amid a major political confrontation with him in 2017, and the ex-Georgian president believes it to be an illegal act and political reprisal.
Saakashvili returned to Ukraine by breaking through the Polish border in 2017, and the Prosecutor General’s Office arrested and charged Saakashvili with complicity in tycoon Serhiy Kurchenko’s criminal group for allegedly receiving money from Kurchenko to finance protests against Poroshenko. Saakashvili has said he believes the case to be the result of Poroshenko’s political vendetta against him.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulik, who was in charge of the case, told the Kyiv Post that Poroshenko had interfered in the Saakashvili case and tried to order prosecutors to investigate and arrest certain Saakashvili allies. Poroshenko’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.
Ukrainian authorities then deported Saakashvili without a court order in February 2018. Ukrainian law explicitly bans deportation without a court order.
Return to Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on May 28 restored Saakashvili’s Ukrainian citizenship. Saakashvili returned to Ukraine on the next day.
Kyiv’s Pechersk Court on June 21 allowed Saakashvili to run in the election. The court argued that he met the 5-year residency requirement for Verkhovna Rada members and had been a legal resident of Ukraine since 2014.
Although he was not physically present in Ukraine after his deportation in February 2018 until his return in May 2019, Saakashvili was still a legal resident of Ukraine because his deportation without a court warrant was illegal, his lawyers argue
