“The protests of the people on the street have given way to real political freedoms in the Ukraine, freedoms which were unthinkable just a few days ago: the freedom to demonstrate, freedom of expression and press freedom.”
— Serhiy Holovaty, Ukrainian Member of Parliament
Speaking at an event organised by the International Press Institute at the Presse Club Concordia, Vienna, Austria, on 29 November, Ukrainian lawyer and pro-Yushchenko Member of Parliament, Serhiy Holovaty told those journalists present “the Ukraine is enjoying an unexpected degree of press freedom.”
Following the journalists strikes against censorship at the state TV station UT-1 and the privately owned, but until recently pro-government TV stations 1+1 and Inter, uncensored debates on almost every subject have been broadcast. “We do not know how long this climate of freedom will last,” Dr. Holovaty added; “[but] for the time being, we are certainly enjoying it.”
Dr. Holovaty went on to highlight the failure of Western media which has “wrongly depicted Ukraine as being divided into a pro-Yushchenko population in the Western region and a pro-Yanukovych population in the Eastern region.” He explained that the people in the Ukraine have voted against the bad economic situation and government corruption. The Eastern Ukraine, however, did not have a chance to vote freely or to choose between the candidates, since the government-controlled media did not provide a proper forum for presenting the opposition candidate and programme.
Asked about electoral fraud Dr. Holovaty quoted a study by Ukrainian NGOs stating it affected approximately 10% of the votes cast, amounting to approximately three million manipulated votes, mainly from the Eastern regions. He then said outlined three examples in support of these claims:
– Between the first and the second round of elections, the number of voters increased by 700,000 (500,000 of them from the Eastern region).
– At 9 p.m., when the polling stations were closed, it was announced that 76% of the population had voted. However, the final official statement claimed that 80.6% of the population had voted. “Would that mean, that approximately one million people voted after the closure of the polling stations?” asked Dr. Holovaty.
– There are serious accusations that in many polling stations the official results were later “corrected” before being delivered to the central electoral commission.
Even if the elections were repeated now, Dr. Holovaty fears they will not be “free and fair elections according to the standards of Western democracies.” And he continued, “you cannot change the practices, the legal framework and the minds of the people, especially in the Eastern region, within three or four weeks.”
Serhiy Holovaty, a lawyer, politician, and one of the main opponents of the present regime, is a distinguished member of the Ukrainian Parliament, and the President of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation. Dr. Holovaty is a former Minister of Justice of Ukraine and one of the “Founding Fathers” of its modern statehood – he is one of the authors of the Ukrainian declaration of independence and its post-Soviet Constitution and Criminal Code. He was also secretary of the investigative commission of the Supreme Council (Rada) that investigated the case of Georgy Gongadze.
