On September 4 MPs opened and closed the parliamentary session. It turned out that they did not agree on the agenda. They voted for changes in the calendar timetable and resolved to work on September 4 and 5 in committees and fractions, and to gather for a plenary meeting on September 6. During the 19 minutes of the session, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov was able to deliver a speech from the rostrum. His main message was that the parliament has to pass “a balanced and absolutely realistic” state budget for 2013. Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn supported Azarov: “We need to make some major decisions and start the procedure of budget preparation.” He also acknowledged that “it is important not to let any conflicts happen, which we know we are so prone to.” And that was it. Viktor Yanukovych was not present at the session’s opening.
Meanwhile, the agenda was posted on the official website of the Verkhovna Rada on Monday and Tuesday. It said that on September 6 the Law No. 2450 “On the Procedure for Organizing and Holding Peaceful Gatherings” was supposed to go through the second reading. But as one of the authors Oleh Zarubinsky (People’s Party parliamentary faction) explained, this law would not be considered on that day.
“The information about this law being on the agenda was posted, because it had to be done out of technical reasons. But I offered to postpone the deliberation until Yurii Miroshnychenko’s draft law is submitted for voting [Draft Law of Ukraine No. 10569 ‘On Amending Legislation Concerning the Freedom of Peaceful Gatherings.’ – Author]. The latter should provide the mechanism of people’s freedom of peaceful assembly,” Zarubinsky says. “During the draft law’s consideration at the committee’s sitting, NGOs expressed their apprehension that the law will be passed, and the mechanism of its realization will ‘hang’ in the parliament for a long time, as it frequently happens. Both laws should be considered and adopted at the same time. But Miroshnychenko’s project was not yet deliberated by the profile committee.” He offers to amend the Administrative Offences Code and Administrative Legal Procedure Code.
This legislative initiative drew the controversial response from the society. NGOs have been constantly showing their discontent. For example, Ukraine-wide Initiative “For a Peaceful Protest” analyzed the draft law and underlined that Part 1, Article 7 defines a common deadline for the notification of the authorities about an upcoming peaceful gathering: it should be no less than two business days before the date when the gathering will be held. “It should be kept in mind that in Ukraine this will be about a week-long term: in practice, with all the weekends and holidays, it might reach five or seven days, and the peaceful gatherings that will take place on Mondays and Tuesdays will have to be reported three or four days in advance. Besides, Ukrainian practice shows that it only takes two days for the court to ban a peaceful gathering on any pretext. The 2011 statistical data from the Single State Registry of Court Rulings of Ukraine shows that 89.4 percent of cases of peaceful gatherings are concluded with the prohibition of the gathering. So, two additional business days of the new law will lead to the great increase of the number of court injunctions of the protests. And over a longer period they might become a time bomb that will cause the bureaucratization or the overall prohibition of spontaneous peaceful protests in Ukraine,” reads the initiative’s statement.
“It is hard to find a more liberal draft law,” Zarubinsky goes on to say. “It is one of the best in Europe. We considered the proposals of numerous NGOs that were represented at the committee’s sittings. And how much time do you think the notification approval should take, two hours? Let us take a look at the international experience: in Sweden it is seven days, in Poland – three, in Germany – five, in the US and Russia – ten. In the majority of the EU countries this process lasts two or more days.”
But Andrii Shkil, MP for the BYuT-Batkivshchyna, thinks that any law that restricts the right for peaceful assembly is bad. “Such laws should be created by Ukrainian NGOs, but not the government,” Shkil comments. “Because NGOs are the least protected structures that are not filtered by the government, react to socially important events very swiftly, and take to streets. The best option would be to initiate a public discussion on what the rights should be, if they should be changed or not, and if they should, in what way. Also, we need an algorithm that would allow the organizations of peaceful gatherings to support or deny initiatives offered by legislative or executive authorities.”
The Initiative “For a Peaceful Protest” emphasizes that legislators ignored an alternative regulation of differential deadlines of peaceful gathering holdings, which was created by Ukrainian human right activists from the Working Group on Elaborating Draft Laws on the Freedom of Peaceful Gatherings: “The minimum deadline for the notification is 12 hours. A similar position is supported by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union: the minimum notification deadline should be no more than 24 hours.”
The draft law has its weak spots: Paragraph 4, Part 2, Article 9 defines an endless source of places where peaceful meetings cannot be held. Wording “the peaceful gathering cannot be held: …in other places, specified by the law” de jure means that the list of prohibited places can be completed with places from all other laws. And also Part 1, Article 14 of the draft law establishes the protester’s duty to “immediately inform the law-enforcement bodies or corresponding local authorities about the date, time, place, purpose of the spontaneous peaceful gathering, and also about measures that have to be taken for the masterminding of spontaneous peaceful gathering.” This duty contradicts the very nature of spontaneous gatherings.
“We cannot adopt any law that will question people’s right to public rallies and freedom of speech,” comments MP Andrii Shevchenko. “Nowadays, for example, the opposition faces huge difficulties when it tries to organize a meeting. We are only going to vote for draft laws that will be definitely supported by the whole civil society and all political parties. In this case it means that the law on peaceful gatherings can only be approved in a legislative package along with amendments to codes and other laws that will help to regulate this matter. This draft law includes useful regulations, and there are a lot of them, but if we adopt it without making amendments to the Administrative Offences Code and other laws, it might become very dangerous. We need to achieve a consensus, and then the law will be supported by the government, the opposition, and the society.”
Our interlocutors could not forecast if this draft law is adopted before the elections. But the more important matter is the quality of the law. Russia’s legislation was amended recently, and the amenability for violations during mass protests was enhanced. This complicated the process of holding of peaceful meetings. Incumbent Ukrainian government has an ill habit of copycatting their Russian colleagues. Will it be the same this time?
