The Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) resolved on April 5 to recommend that PACE suspend Ukraine’s membership. The decision is simultaneously expected and unexpected. Ms. Hanne Severinsen, the PACE rapporteur who visited Kyiv the week before last, remained dissatisfied with many problems still unsolved in Ukraine. Yet she expressed hope that this country would remain in the Council of Europe. Some Ukrainian members of parliament were also convinced after meeting Ms. Severinsen that the Monitoring Committee’s decision would obviously contain criticism but still fall short of proposing the expulsion of Ukraine from the organization. What Ukraine can now hope for is that the Monitoring Committee’s decision will find no support at the PACE session to be held later this month. Ms. Severinsen partly shared this opinion, when she told UNIAN on April 6 that the session might replace the recommendation of membership suspension with that of “strong warning.”
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not seem to be panic-stricken over the recommendation. The foreign office “is studying very carefully” the PACE Monitoring Committee’s decision, Serhiy Borodenkov, the ministry’s deputy press service chief, said a briefing last Friday. He also announced that the Foreign Ministry is satisfied that Verkhovna Rada had passed the Criminal Code and the law On the Judicial System in the second reading. Saying this, he emphasized the necessity for parliament to speed up the passage of the bills Ukraine pledged to adopt when entering the CE. Director of the Foreign Ministry’s contract-and- law department Oleksandr Kupchyshyn stressed, commenting on the Monitoring Committee’s decision, that adoption of the Criminal Code and the law On Political Parties by Verkhovna Rada is “an extremely important step forward” in meeting the commitments Ukraine made to the Council of Europe. If this step is not duly appraised in PACE, then the reason why the Monitoring Committee made this decision “should be sought elsewhere.”
