Apart from Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Kyiv hosted another ranking British guest in April, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Queen’s Counsel, member of the House of Lords and Chair of the British Council (since 1998), visiting the Ukrainian capital to attend the ceremony of opening the new British Council premises on Voloska Street, at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
Prior to the Baroness’s arrival The Guardian wrote of her as a woman that built her spectacular career “on her credentials as radical outsider”, one who doesn’t hesitate to give the government a hard time. “She looks like she’s dressed by Principles,” The Guardian wrote. Daughter of a newspaper print worker from Glasgow, she ascended to the political summit, becoming the best-known female lawyer in the land, receiving a life peerage and “counts half the British Cabinet among her personal friends”.
Her manners and speech, the way she looks at you reveal willpower, self-discipline, erudition raised to the highest level. And, of course, feminine charm. In Kyiv, during the opening ceremony, the other attending dignitaries, among them Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Borys Tarasiuk, and foreign ambassadors treated the Baroness with marked respect, and not because of protocol. It was just that she immediately put people at ease, creating an atmosphere of genuine friendliness and rapprochement.
Criminal legal practice is still among Lady Helena’s professional priorities. Remarkably, despite her traditionally tight schedule, she finds the time for dozens of other most variegated commitments. She is very active in the feminist and juvenile penitentiary domains. She writes books, is an acclaimed BBC hostess, heads the London International Theatrical Festival, and is the devoted mother of three. And while in Kyiv, Lady Helena graciously agreed to an interview with The Day.
“Britain has always taken special pains to promote its culture in Ukraine. What most essential cultural and scientific activities have been scheduled by the British Council? How do you assess the results of the British Council’s activity in Ukraine in the last two years which have passed since you were appointed its chair?”
“The British Council has always interpreted our cultural relations with the rest of the world very widely. We’ve always seen culture as being about not just the arts or music, visual arts, design or literature. We also see it as being our law and governance, we see it as being about our science, technology and many aspects of British life. Culture often reaches parts that politics and formal diplomacy can’t reach. What we’ve been seeking to do in our period here in Ukraine has been to obviously work around the English language. We imagine that the new centre will provide opportunities for more English language teaching, but not just in a pedagogical way, English language being used also for very practical purposes. For example, we teach English to the military. There are discussions of your army becoming part of peacekeeping corps in NATO if Ukraine joins the European Union. So peacekeeping English is very important to that function, and we’ve been teaching English to your military for that purpose, in preparation. We’ve also been teaching English to military personnel who are intending leaving the military because of the downsizing of your military. I know that your military is very large and there is a plan to reduce the numbers, and it is important that men and women who have given their services to their country should have opportunities for new careers, and we are providing English for those who want it, for whatever they plan to do.
“We’ve been also taking up projects in partnership with Ukrainian organisations or Ukrainian government departments around, for example, the reform program you are going through during this period. Whenever you say you would be interested in working on a particular area, we then try to respond by perhaps bringing people who may have some areas of expertise or some areas for the sharing of ideas. And the learning is two way, let me assure you. We learn from you because you are going through a period of change, and we, too, in Britain are going through a period of change. Even old democracies like Britain have to keep revitalising themselves to ensure that they are still listening to the people and responding to the changing needs of people in the modern world.”
“Is the British Council less or more active in Ukraine than in other 109 countries, say, than in Germany or Poland?”
“We are very responsive to the country that we are working in. If the country we are working in wants to be engaged with Britain in, for example, building of civil society, then we will respond commensurate to the interest in working in partnership with Britain. Because Ukraine has expressed more and more enthusiasm for being engaged in that kind of work with Britain, we’ve upped the scale of the British Council activity here. We see the enlargement of Europe as being a very exciting project in creating security and stability in this part of the world, and we see Ukraine as being one of the countries, which has a great deal to offer. It is a country with enormously talented people, and if that talent is given an opportunity, this country has a great future. To be part of that process and to share in that process with you benefits the whole of the European Union. It’s self-interest, too, for Britain because we want Europe to be more stable, more successful.”
“We all know that the West looks on Ukraine with disquiet and mistrust. Some analysts even think that helping Ukraine financially, the West is also financing our inefficient system of public administration. George Soros in his book Who Lost Russia? states this quite definitely. How does the British Council take this into consideration in its activities, and how do you personally view aid to Ukraine?”
“First of all, I would like to say that some of what George Soros is saying may be true. I think that it was very hard for a country like Ukraine, after years of being under Soviet control, to come out from underneath that experience and to rebuild and to give confidence to people that there was a future which could be different — it was a very difficult challenge. I think that after the initial euphoria of independence it was very hard for people to start rebuilding their lives, especially when the future is still uncertain and people are afraid of change, particularly older people. I think what we have realised at the British Council, being involved in providing a certain amount of partnership in your great challenge, is that we feel that most of our work is directed towards young people. That’s why we feel that our work in education, our work in helping the teacher training and our work on human rights is the most helpful way that we can contribute to Ukraine’s future, partly because young people are not afraid of change, they know because information and communication is so much better. They know that the world they’re creating can be different. Their expectations are different, they’re right to be more demanding, and that’s wonderful.
“I spent some time with teachers who are involved in a project the British Council is running, a training project about personal development for teachers, which will reach into every school in Ukraine. What is wonderful about it is that those teachers, women mainly and women in their middle years, are exciting, dynamic, fantastic teachers who do not want to be teaching in the old-fashioned way where they are authoritarian and standing in front of a class telling people what to do. They want to teach, they want to create a democratic intellect. They see their role as being more than old-fashioned teaching — they see themselves as being enablers, and that teaching is about bringing out the potential in every young person and about creating tomorrow’s democratic citizen, a citizen who knows that their own empowerment is what is going to make Ukraine a wonderful dynamic country. I was excited by that, and I think those teachers are your future. And we have to keep nurturing them and make sure that you don’t lose them because there isn’t a lot of money around to pay them their salaries.
“The other thing is the interest in human rights, the belief that hand in hand with economic development there has to be a recognition of the humanity which individual person has at the heart of this, because for too long that was neglected. We are going through a process of change ourselves in Britain, where we have just incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights, and so it’s going to make a big difference in Britain because people will start thinking about human rights more. I think particularly on human rights, we’ve all got things to learn, none of us have perfected it yet. We still do not deal with the trials of young people in a very sensitive way. We treated them like adults in the courts, so we are having to develop new ways of dealing with the criminal behaviour of children. There is learning to be done by all of us on this front, and I think it’s exciting that we can do it hand in hand rather than in a didactic way.”
“Ukraine has been cautioned that its membership in the Council of Europe is in jeopardy because of its limp efforts on legal reform, human rights violations, and the state’s interference in the work of law enforcement organs. What should Ukraine do first to create a civil society?”
“One of the things that’s very important is to have good training of the judiciary on human rights issues. For example, in Britain now we are having very intensive training of our judiciary on human rights. But we could create exchange programs for your judges to come and spend some time in Britain and we could also send judges and lawyers from Britain to Ukraine to take part in the seminars and discussions about how do you strengthen the independence of the judiciary, how do you prevent corruption, how do you give citizens the confidence that judges are going to approach cases impartially, and that they are truly independent and respectful of human rights. To do that, when you haven’t had a tradition in the past because of your being engaged under the Soviet rule — there was no independence or no real independence of the judiciary then — it’s very important that there is a process of change, and you probably have to think about accelerating it. Perhaps, there is a role for the British Council there, how we could be helpful to you and to your Ministry of Justice, and we certainly would be interested in doing that.”
“The series of critical articles on political and economic practices in Ukraine, which appeared recently in The Financial Times, caused a storm of reaction in the Ukrainian press. Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko thinks that such materials appeared in the West on order directly from Ukraine. Some analysts understand the attack in the British press as dirty pool in support of democracy, being used by the West to stimulate reforms in Ukraine. How do you feel and what do you think about those publications?”
“There is no doubt that a certain amount of stimulus is necessary to make people feel prepared to engage with change, and speedy change. There are some people who have a vested interest in keeping things progressing at a fairly slow rate. We cannot allow it to stagnate. On the one hand, you have reactionary forces who do not want to change in the first place, and then you have people who benefit from the transition — a slow transition can often create benefits for them individually, and those people also have good reasons for not wanting to progress at the speed that would be expected. What you really have to do is not allow that to happen. I think outside stimulus is necessary, but internally, those who are really committed to reform have to be tenacious and they really have to be very determined. Otherwise, investors and others are not going to be confident about putting money into your new exciting nation.”
“How does the British man in the street respond to the word Ukraine, except, Chornobyl, Kyiv Dynamo and perhaps recently National Bank?”
“First of all, people in Britain are more knowledgeable about Ukraine than they are about most of the other countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Russia and Ukraine are the main countries that they know about. They also, of course, think of this as being the breadbasket, and that is something that people have learned at some stage at school. So they know that this was a very fruitful part of the world which had suffered terribly, went through a terrible famine in the 1930s, but which has the potential of being regenerated. People also know that things are tough here. I think there is a lot of good will towards Ukraine, and it’s very important that you don’t lose that good will and become stereotyped as being yet another country foundering with attempts at modernising. That’s why you’ve got to seize the moment and really push ahead with reforms and push ahead with creation of the kind of base which will make investors confident about putting in money here. You see, if you don’t have a good legal system with an independent judiciary where people have confidence in the legal processes, they will not want to come and take part in and get involved in contractual relationships here. If you don’t have respect for human rights, people will not want to have their staff to come and work in Ukraine. You’ve got to get those things right, and if you are not investing in, for example, the acquisition of English language, then of course, the global market is conducted in English and so is the Internet, so it is very important that those moves take place. We want to work in partnership with you to help with this as much of that as possible, so that it happens as speedily as possible.“
“One of the problems facing many Ukrainian women is that in Ukraine’s realities women are unfortunately guaranteed only the right to live in a world of male priorities instead of having equal opportunities. When do you think an active women’s movement arises, in an advanced society or in one that is in crisis in order to foster that society’s development?”
“I think that crises have never in the end benefited women; it is actually a degree of prosperity that helps women because when there is prosperity then there are more jobs, more women participate; when there is prosperity more women get opportunities that they didn’t get before. So it is really prosperity that gives women opportunities and which really liberates women. The great liberator is, of course, education. My family were working class people, they did not have higher education, and so a liberator for me was having an option to go to university. I see those opportunities as being the thing that changes life, and that’s what we have to make available to more people, whether it’s in Britain or in Ukraine. I’ve spent a lot of my life struggling for women’s rights, and some of the Ukrainian women I met were saying women in Britain have managed to create equality, and it’s true that we’ve made great advances. But there are still pockets of resistance and struggle is still going on, and we have quite a bit further to go. Because, again, I think it really is to the benefit of all of society and to men, too, if women achieve equality, and their human rights are respected.”
“The road you have traversed from the home of Irish Catholic parents to the very pinnacle of the British political Establishment, to become a Queen’s Counsel, receiving a life peerage, and still taking care of a family with three children cannot help but call forth admiration. Would you share with us your secret of how you budgeted your time?” “I only do the things that I feel passionate about. I am very disciplined about my work. And of course, I have three children and a husband, so I try to make sure that there’s space in my life for making sure that my home life is looked after, too. It’s getting the balance right at heart for women, but it’s worth it, if we can just from the heart listen to our inner voice and make sure that if we feel that any bits of our lives are being neglected we set it right.”
“I would wish many Ukrainian women the chances you have had.”
“I know, and, you see, I know I’ve been very privileged, and I want those chances for women everywhere.”
