Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe threatens to suspend Ukraine's credentials (05/30/99)

Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe threatens to suspend Ukraine's credentials

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly may suspend the credentials of Ukraine's parliamentary delegation after a monitoring committee decided on May 20 that Ukraine was not making substantial progress in the commitments it made when it joined the organization in 1995.

The monitoring committee, acting on a report by two of its members who had traveled to Ukraine several times to review how Ukraine was proceeding in developing human rights legislation and legal reforms - chief among them the abolition of capital punishment - concluded that Ukraine was not moving fast enough.

In January 1999 Hanne Severinsen and Tunne Kelam, rapporteurs for the monitoring committee, reported to the assembly that Ukraine's government and Parliament "were responsible to a great extent for the failure to respect the commitments in respect of legal reforms and the death penalty."

A spokesperson at the Council of Europe's Kyiv office emphasized that the move was not a recommendation to have Ukraine's membership in the European assembly canceled but a notification that until Ukraine does begin to further improve human rights standards its delegation would not be seated at assembly meetings.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is a quasi-governmental European body of representatives of the parliaments of Europe that has no legislative authority, but some policy-making influence through a limited number of sanctions that it can apply to its 41 member-states.

The chief issue, the refusal of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada to comply with a requirement that it must ban the death penalty in Ukraine, may not be resolved quickly here. More than 60 percent of Ukrainians have stated that they support capital punishment for certain violent crimes. In addition, abolition of capital punishment has little support among national deputies from both sides of the political aisle.

The highly publicized murder trial of serial killer Anatolii Onoprienko, who was sentenced to death by a Zhytomyr court last month for the murder of 52 men, women and children, has only made the prospect of abolition more unlikely in the near future.

President Leonid Kuchma stated even before the verdict was rendered that a person such as Mr. Onoprienko should die - a pronouncement that did not gone unnoticed in Strasbourg, France, headquarters of the Council of Europe.

And with the presidential election season heating up, the candidates, many of whom are leaders in Ukraine's Parliament, are not going to be pushing for a ban on the death penalty when a majority of Ukrainians believe it is still needed.

Ukraine agreed to a moratorium on the death penalty in early 1997, after PACE representatives had criticized Ukraine for continuing to execute criminals and initially threatened the country with suspension. President Kuchma announced at the time that his government would no longer carry out death sentences, and the Verkhovna Rada said it would soon introduce a law to ban executions.

Many national deputies believe that the monitoring committee's recommendation stands little chance of being approved by the full Parliamentary Assembly and that the committee recommendation is a tool being used by the assembly to force Ukraine into compliance.

The conventional wisdom that has developed in the Verkhovna Rada is that Ukraine is being scrutinized with a microscope and used as an example for other countries that also have not fulfilled their commitments.

"This is not the first time that monitoring committee members have treated Ukraine this way," said National Deputy Leonid Kravchuk. "It is difficult, however, to make an argument against the decision. We can disagree, but we ought to honor our commitments."

Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko told Interfax-Ukraine that Ukraine has fulfilled 30 of the 42 commitments it made when it took Council of Europe membership in December 1995. He underscored that a number of other member-states also had not abolished the death penalty. "Why is this approach being applied specifically to Ukraine?" asked the Parliament chairman.

Borys Oliynyk, Communist Party member and head of Ukraine's parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe, suggested that, given Europe's violent stance towards Yugoslavia, membership in the Council of Europe may no longer even be desired.

"If it does [suspend Ukraine] we will not regret it, because I feel uneasy dealing with an organization that fully supports murder in Yugoslavia," said Mr. Oliynyk.

The full Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will vote on the proposal put forward by the monitoring committee at its plenary session in June.

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