Supreme Court overrules Election Commission, admits more candidates into presidential race (08/15/99)

Supreme Court overrules Election Commission, admits more candidates into presidential race

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's Supreme Court, exercising its authority and independence for the first time on the national political arena, has overturned several Central Election Commission decisions not to register presidential candidates.

In the last week the CEC has been forced by the Supreme Court to register four candidates whom it had rejected after deciding that each one had gathered less than the 1 million authentic signatures that are required to get on the October presidential elections ballot. Each of the four - Vasyl Onopenko, Mykola Haber, Oleksander Rzhavskyi and Mykola Bazyliuk - had submitted more than the required minimum by the July 12 deadline. The CEC had ruled that hundreds of thousands of those signatures gathered by the four presidential hopefuls and two other possible candidates were fraudulent and rejected their candidacies on that basis.

On August 6, Ukraine's Supreme Court, to which all six of the rejected candidates had appealed the CEC decisions, ruled against the CEC in the matter of Mr. Onopenko and demanded that the CEC immediately register the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party leader.

On August 9 it decided that the CEC had no grounds to throw aside the candidacy of Mr. Haber of the Patriotic Party, as well. A day later the court accepted the appeal of Mr. Rzhavskyi, who leads the Single Family political association. On August 11, Slavic Party nominee Mr. Bazyliuk found salvation in another Supreme Court decision and was registered as the 13th candidate for president.

The Supreme Court has been basing its decision in each case on CEC's failure to uphold its own procedures. Most notably, the court has ruled that the election commission should have determined within five days of receiving the nominees' signature petitions whether the candidates could be registered.

According to the Supreme Court, when the CEC determined that any of the candidates had gathered less than the minimum of 1 million signatures required by law, with at least 30,000 from each of at least 18 oblasts, it then was compelled to give each candidate an additional two days to scrape up the needed balance.

In each case the court ruled that because the CEC failed to follow the procedure as outlined in Ukraine's presidential election law, it was now required to extend a spot on the October ballot to the candidate.

The CEC has defended its actions and stated that the court is rendering decisions without a full presentation of the evidence.

CEC Chairman Mykhailo Riabets said at an August 10 press conference that he does not agree with the Supreme Court rulings, but that he is following its orders and registering the candidates in a gesture of respect for the rule of law.

"The Supreme Court has not given us any documentation to explain the rationale behind its ruling," explained Mr. Riabets. "They have never asked for a key piece of evidence: the actual signature petitions submitted by the candidates," he added.

The Supreme Court has said that it does not need to review the signatures because it is not questioning the veracity of the CEC conclusions, merely the procedures that were used.

Mr. Riabets said the judicial decisions would be appealed to the Supreme Court Collegium.

The CEC was overwhelmed in the last week before the deadline for submitting petitions, when it received some 15 million signatures from candidates. Mr. Riabets had stated at the time that the deluge of last-minute submissions was, in his opinion, an attempt to clog the system and compromise it.

The candidates, while happily accepting the Supreme Court rulings, maintain that they have each legally gathered far more than the minimum number of signatures required and that the CEC decisions were politically driven from above. None of them is yet ready, however, to identify specifically who handed down the command.

"I can state frankly that the CEC decision was a political order," said Mr. Rzhavskyi after the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. He would not state who gave it, however.

A successful fellow appellant, Mr. Onopenko, would only say that the orders came from "the gang on Bankivska Street" (where the presidential administration buildings are housed).

"Riabets would not have broken the law if he had not received orders from above. What scares me is not that it was ordered on Onopenko, but the whole principle behind it," explained Mr. Onopenko.

He said what was surprising to him as he watched the court proceedings was that the CEC lawyers could not explain why they had thrown out signatures, and did not even describe the signature verification process.

Mr. Onopenko, who until 1995 was President Leonid Kuchma's minister of justice and has been associated with the Supreme Court in the past, gave high praise to the judicial body's assertion of authority over the election process.

"The third branch of power is finally getting on its feet and beginning to make the decisions required of it," said Mr. Onopenko.

There has been speculation among political observers, however, that the Supreme Court ruling also is entrenched in politics.

One theory suggests that Supreme Court Chief Justice Vitalii Boyko is using his position to throw wide open the election process that the presidential administration has attempted to quietly craft.

A press secretary to one of the original candidates registered for the presidential elections, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to The Ukrainian Weekly that Mr. Boyko and the president had been at political odds since Mr. Boyko was recalled as ambassador to Moldova not long after Mr. Kuchma took office.

According to the press secretary, Mr. Boyko's loyalties lie with Oleksander Moroz, one of president's chief rivals in the upcoming elections, who as chairman of the Verkhovna Rada supported the nomination and election of the former ambassador to head the nation's highest appellate court.

Because the six candidates who were not registered by the CEC are given almost no chance of winning the elections, they will most likely eventually throw the little support they have to one of the front-runners in exchange for political consideration. In this case the recipient of the added support could be Mr. Moroz.

Not everyone agrees, however. Mykola Tomenko, a political analyst for the Institute of Politics, said that although there may be some merit to such a conspiracy theory, he could not agree that such overt political maneuvering is taking place.

"It is far from clear who will benefit politically from a large field of candidates," explained Mr. Tomenko. "If [Vitalii] Kononov [the Greens Party candidate] and Rzhavskyi throw their votes to Kuchma in the end, then it will be for his benefit. They have both supported him in the past."

As The Weekly was going to press, Interfax-Ukraine reported that the Supreme Court had ordered that Mr. Kononov be registered as the 14th candidate in the presidential elections. Still undetermined is the appeal filed by the sixth candidate who was rejected by the CEC, Yurii Karmazin of the Defenders of the Homeland Party.

The immediate question is whether the elections themselves are now under threat. If Mr. Riabets and the election commission are forced to resign, which several of the latest candidates are calling for, it would be nearly impossible to elect a new commission in time to still hold the vote at the end of October.

For now, Mr. Riabets is refusing to consider even the possibility of his departure.

"The Central Election Commission and its chairman are not preparing to offer their resignations and will continue to execute their responsibilities in full until the elections are completed," said Mr. Riabets on August 10.

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