Hanne Severinsen and Renate Wohlwend, special rapporteurs of the monitoring committee of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), completed their visit to Kyiv on January 20. According to Ms. Severinsen, the aim of the visit was familiarization with various aspects of the constitutional amendment process in Ukraine which PACE has been carefully watching for the past four years. It was originally planned that the PACE rapporteurs would visit Ukraine in February, Ms. Severinsen told a press conference in Verkhovna Rada on the same day, but these plans had to be revised because the Ukrainian constitutional reform issue was placed on the agenda of the PACE session scheduled for the end of January. Incidentally, deputy head of Verkhovna Rada’s permanent delegation to PACE, Anatoly Rakhansky (Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Ukraine and Labor Ukraine fraction), who also attended the press conference, opined that the PACE monitoring committee had breached the procedural and time-limit rules when making this decision. As Mr. Rakhansky told journalists after the press conference, this point was raised when the session reached the item “miscellaneous” on the agenda. Moreover, many of the 79 PACE members, including Ms. Severinsen herself, were absent at the moment. It was the representative of Hungary who moved the proposal to urgently discuss the constitutional crisis in Ukraine at Ms. Severinsen’s request. “I asked him to explain what he meant by constitutional crisis, but he said he knew nothing,” Mr. Rakhansky said bitterly. “In this case, I see this as a prejudiced attitude toward Ukraine: the initiator of the discussion should have laid down the essence of the matter and insist on a debate. Please tell me how on earth can one vote on something without having debated on it? They criticize us for allegedly voting in this way, but they themselves breach the rules of procedures...”
“I am personally not in rapture over what happened on January 24,” head of the Ukrainian delegation to PACE Borys Oliynyk told The Day. “but I don’t think this matter should by all means be discussed urgently. If someone is so eager, we might as well discuss this calmly in April. We will clearly see the outlines of what is going on. But now... It is like whistling before the goal was scored...”
Sharing her impressions of her contacts in Kyiv, Ms. Severinsen herself looked more restrained than she did earlier in the interview with Channel Five’s “Time” program, where she expressed hope that the bill on constitutional amendments approved by 276 votes on December 24 will be re-voted upon in the first reading and concluded that there is a parliamentary crisis in Ukraine. “I believe we must speak of the procedure, not of the crisis,” Ms. Severinsen told the January 20 press conference, politely advising her Ukrainian colleagues “to avoid situations when the parliamentary system can be discredited.” She also reminded the audience some copybook maxims, such as: “changing the Constitution is not changing a shirt.., amendments should be made in a constitutional way” (otherwise the Council of Europe will “take a serious view” of what is going on in Ukraine), “the opposition and the majority should sit down at the negotiating table,” and “there can be any model, but there should be a system of checks and balances, division of powers, and freedom of speech.” At the same time, Ms. Severinsen said she intended to conduct a dialogue with, rather than deliver lectures to, the Ukrainian side.
During the visit, the PACE monitoring committee’s rapporteurs spoke with Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, Presidential Administration Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk, representatives of almost all parliamentary factions and groups, media, and non-governmental organizations, and met the top officials of the Constitutional Court, the Ministry of Justice, and the Prosecutor General’s Office. “Two-thirds of the people’s deputies we met represented the parliamentary majority,” Ms. Severinsen told The Day. “There also were members of the three opposition factions and the Communists who, as far as I understand, had joined the majority...” The Day’s correspondent reports that, when the guests were visiting the Presidential Administration (PA), its head Viktor Medvedchuk noted, among other things, that “one of the aims of the political reform is departing from the authoritarian system the remnants of which we inherited from the overly centralized Soviet system of government.” In Mr. Medvedchuk’s view, transition to a more European-type parliamentary-presidential system is possible only under the current president: postponing the reform in fact means renouncing it. As to whether the December 24 voting was legitimate, the administration chief reminded the guests that in January 2000 the majority of Verkhovna Rada members gathered in the Ukrainian House and voted by a show of hands for a number of resolutions, which the current opposition does not challenge as illegitimate. Mr. Medvedchuk also added that one of the current opposition leaders, the then Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, had personally thanked him, who presided over that session as Verkhovna Rada vice speaker, for organizing the voting of Volodymyr Stelmakh into the office of National Bank governor. The PACE rapporteurs thanked Mr. Medvedchuk for a meaningful conversation and stressed that, in the Council of Europe’s view, any constitutional changes are the internal affair of Ukraine; the main thing is that these changes should promote democratic development and be brought about in a democratic way.
Talking to journalists, the PACE rapporteurs chose not to draw conclusions from their “urgent” visit: their vision of the situation will be reflected in the report they are going to write on coming back to Strasbourg. Yet, one of the conclusion is already clear: the European institutions’ opinion of Ukraine primarily depends on the Ukrainian political class’s aptitude, wisdom, and ability to refrain from selling the PACE monitoring on the domestic political market.
