Facing potential dismissal after issuing a ruling that undermined Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, the Constitutional Court appeared to tread carefully and delayed several contentious issues it had on its agenda for this week.
On the morning of Nov. 3, the Constitutional Court removed from its agenda the hearing on the constitutionality of the Deposit Guarantee Fund, a dangerous issue that could seriously harm the country’s banking system.
Later on the same day, the court ended its hearing of the constitutionality of Ukraine’s contentious language law without issuing a ruling. The next hearing on the matter has not yet been scheduled.
The court is reviewing the language law at the formal request of 51 former and sitting lawmakers.
An annulment of the language law, which was adopted in 2019 to strengthen the Ukrainian language, could have grave consequences, including violent protests.
President Volodymyr Zelensky hinted at that when he accused the Constitutional Court of leading the country to “bloodshed.”
The court’s hesitance to rule on two contentious issues on its agenda comes just as Zelensky and the Verkhovna Rada are looking for a way to prevent the justices from undermining any more reforms. The most extreme path — to dismiss the court — so far isn’t finding the required support in parliament.
Ukraine’s language law
Under the country’s constitution, Ukrainian is the only official state language. In April 2019, the parliament passed a bill making Ukrainian the main language of virtually all spheres of public life, including governance, education, the media, the service sector and business. It also made passing a Ukrainian language exam a requirement for obtaining Ukrainian citizenship. The law would come into force after a three-year transition period.
After lawmakers made exceptions for English, Crimean Tatar and the official languages of the European Union, the 2019 bill was widely understood to be an effort to strengthen the role of Ukrainian over Russian, which is still widely spoken in Ukraine.
After Russia-backed militants occupied the Donbas and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian government took a number of steps to limit Russian propaganda by banning certain Russian media outlets and social networking sites and introduced language quotas to increase the amount of Ukrainian content on radio and television.
But the language bill didn’t only face backlash from pro-Russian politicians who claimed it discriminated against Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian citizens. Hungary has blocked discussions between Ukraine and NATO, alleging that the language law and the 2017 education law, which made Ukrainian the sole language of secondary education, limited the rights of the ethnic Hungarian minority in the country’s western Zakarpattya Oblast.
The Constitution of Ukraine guarantees the “free development, usage and protection of Russian and other languages of ethnic minorities” and “no discrimination based on language.”
In the 2001 census, ethnic Russians made up 17.3% of the Ukrainian population. This number is cited in the request to the Constitutional Court. While Ukraine has not held a nationwide census in nearly two decades, various surveys suggest that as many as 90% of citizens identify themselves as Ukrainians by nationality.
For years, the Kremlin has stoked the perceived language issue in Ukraine and promoted accusations of discrimination against Russian speakers.
The reality is far less extreme.
In an August poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Razumkov Center, 73.4% of 2,018 respondents called Ukrainian their native language and 22% named Russian. Roughly 60% said they spoke Ukrainian at home, at work or in school.
Over 92% supported the idea that every Ukrainian citizen must know the state language. And 66% of respondents said Russian could be freely used in private life, while Ukrainian should be the only state language. Nearly 18% said Russian should be granted an official status in certain regions.
While Russian has historically been more used in the east and south of Ukraine, the percentage of citizens there who named Ukrainian or Russian as their native language was almost equal. And 20-23% of respondents from the central, eastern and southern regions said they spoke both Ukrainian and Russian at work or school.
The request to the Constitutional Court is dated April 21, 2019 and was signed by 51 lawmakers of the previous parliamentary convocation who belonged to two pro-Russian factions, Opposition Bloc and Vidrodzhennya (Renaissance), as well as one member of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, Vasyl Brenzovych, leader of the Party of Hungarians of Ukraine.
Eighteen of those lawmakers from Opposition Bloc were re-elected to the new parliament in the July 2019 elections. Most of them belong to the 44-seat Opposition Platform—For Life, a pro-Russian faction.
