“Things are moving,” ascertained participants of the Eighth All-Ukrainian Right to Information Human Rights Seminar held two weeks ago on the International Human Rights Day. IREX ProMedia and the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, with financial assistance of the Dutch embassy, were organizers of the event. The presence of changes for the better was noted regarding the application of European Court experience by Ukrainian courts at the initial level in cases of legal defense of dignity and honor against mass media outlets. Participants in the seminar — lawyers, judges, and journalists from throughout Ukraine — mentioned from their own experiences with two cases of the kind in Kyiv, two in Mykolayiv, and one in Luhansk. “We ourselves must build democracy,” said Svitlana Buldyhyna, head of an independent human rights defense organization in Dnipropetrovsk, as if summing up the discussion.
One major problem in exercising one’s right to information, for example, consists in the fact that journalists themselves, who are entitled with responsibility to inform society about actions by the authorities, do not always know how they can obtain the information they need from official bodies. “Knock, and they will open the door,” cochairman of Kharkiv Human Rights Defense Group Yevhen Zakharov. According to him, his organization obtains the data they need from the Supreme Court, Justice Ministry, Department of Penal Corrections; but at the same time many state bodies still prefer not to answer. Unfortunately, there is an obvious tendency toward an increase in number of documents closed to society, Mr. Zakharov stated. The state of affairs with access to archives, especially to the departmental archives of law enforcement bodies that have the right to constantly file documents, make researchers face a strange situation when they cannot demand, but only ask, because the work with the documents of that kind requires so many references and permissions, pointed out Ihor Usenko, department head at Koretsky Institute of State and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Ukraine Onno Hatinga van’t Sant in his speech said that the Dutch consider that the right to information has two aspects — an active one when the state provides information to parliament and the public without their special request, and a passive one when the state has to answer an inquiry. Any citizen of the Netherlands can obtain copy of any document, official memoranda included, except those containing state secrets. The issue of inaccessibility to society of information concerning activities of law enforcement bodies was raised in the report of Anatoly Matsko, Chairman of the Department of International Law and Comparative Jurisprudence at the Institute of Law. Incidentally, the speakers pointed out that unfortunately in draft new criminal code that is to be voted on by Verkhovna Rada in the next few days, the clause of criminal prosecution for slander is preserved. Instead, they argued, this clause should more naturally have been included in the civil code.
