UKRAINE: CODEL PRICE GREETED BY RADA CRISIS, HAS

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 KYIV 000921 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV PREL UP SUBJECT: UKRAINE: CODEL PRICE GREETED BY RADA CRISIS, HAS SUBSTANTIVE EXCHANGES REF: KYIV 823 Sensitive but unclassified, please handle accordingly. ¶1. (SBU) Summary. The visit Codel Price and members of the House Democracy Assistance Commission to Kyiv on April 1-3 came at a contested moment for the development of Ukraine's parliament--a constitutional crisis over whether the ruling coalition majority was formed unconstitutionally and whether President Yushchenko has the right to dissolve the Rada and call new elections. The Codel participated in a large number of meetings with Rada leaders and MPs, as well as with Prime Minister Yanukovych and FM Yatsenyuk, and was presented with a range of views on the current political standoff. The Codel also engaged in substantive exchanges about how the Rada functions on a regular basis. Some Rada committees were trying to strengthen their oversight capabilities, which have been traditionally weak. MPs voiced views on NATO membership, MP criminal immunity, the need for decentralizing power, and the budget process. The meeting with FM Yatsenyuk will be reported septel. End summary. Yanukovych: New Political System Working Fine -------------- ¶2. (SBU) Prime Minister Yanukovych cited peaceful rallies on March 31 as a sign of Ukraine's political maturity. He said that the Rada was now in the process of developing legislative underpinnings for the constitutional reforms that were passed in December 2004 and implemented on January 1, 2006, with the goal of smoothly coordinating the work of the executive and legislative branches. Speedy passage of WTO-related legislation was one of the first fruits of constitutional reform, he argued. The PM argued that the Constitutional Court had the ultimate responsibility to decide how the constitutional reforms should be implemented; relevant appeals were before the Court now. Responding to a question whether the coalition would refrain from assembling a 300-member majority, Yanukovych asked rhetorically whether someone would deliberately injure himself by knocking his head against a brick wall. He claimed that the constitution had no applicable provisions for early elections before the end of the Rada's term in 2011. Ukraine had to operate within a constitutional framework, he insisted. Support for Europe, but NATO Remains an Open Question -------------- -------------- ¶3. (SBU) Yanukovych told the Codel that while the Ukrainian public had a positive attitude toward EU membership, its attitude toward NATO was less positive. The government had authorized funding for the first time to support an information campaign (note: funding actually began in 2006. end note); unlike his predecessors, Yanukovych would not be arguing that Ukraine had to join NATO immediately, so as not to alarm the Ukrainian public and provide ammunition to fringe parties. Euro-Integration Committee Chair Propokovych (Our Ukraine) also admitted that NATO was a tougher sell than the EU. Europe was the proper focus for Ukraine, since 70 percent of Ukraine's Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) came from EU countries, and the Rada had successfully passed WTO legislation. NATO integration posed greater problems, she stressed, and Yanukovych's promise of an information campaign was probably the best they could hope for right now. Ukraine needed more information from countries that had recently joined NATO, in particular, the economic advantages of NATO membership, to show to the Ukrainian public. Big business was already working towards European standards, but the rest of the country still needed to be convinced. Political Crisis: the Majority View -------------- ¶4. (SBU) Both before and after President Yushchenko's April 2 announcement that he was dissolving the Rada and calling new elections, most MPs led off their discussions with Codel with their views on whether new elections were constitutional and whether they were a good idea politically. ¶5. (SBU) Expressing the majority coalition view, Rada Speaker Moroz said there was no crisis because there was no question--new elections and dissolving the Rada were unconstitutional. President Yushchenko, he complained, was interfering in the work of the Rada. Since the major parties Regions, BYuT, OU, and SPU all shared political priorities, they should be able to agree on agenda, but the opposition was trying to resolve issues by disrupting Rada sessions. Nevertheless, the Rada would continue working; the current Rada had already passed 138 bills, 108 of them by at least a 2/3 majority. KYIV 00000921 002 OF 003 ¶6. (SBU) Representatives of the newly renamed National Unity Coalition--Party of Regions' Oleksandr Peklushenko and Leonid Kozhara, Socialist Ivan Bokiy, and Communist Petro Tsybenko--met the Codel together to make the case that SIPDIS dissolving the Rada was not constitutional. They claimed that Article 90 of the constitution listed the specific circumstances under which the Rada could be dissolved, but that Yushchenko's decree did not cite this article as its justification. Bokiy added that the Rada was ignoring Yushchenko's order to cease working immediately because article 60 obliges citizens not to carry out "criminal decisions," which is what they consider Yushchenko's decree to be (note: the most common reading of Ukrainian law holds that the Presidential decree should be considered legally in force until overturned by constitutional court review. End Note). Peklushenko explained that recent constitutional reforms had stripped Yushchenko of his authority to dismiss the Prime Minister and he was now attempting to get it back again by unconstitutional means. Our Ukraine dissenting views from Yushchenko -------------- ¶7. (SBU) Underscoring the ongoing fractured nature of Our Ukraine, MP Serhiy Bychkov, sent to represent the OU faction, launched a meandering attack against his own faction, Yushchenko, and opposition leader Tymoshenko. Bychkov started the meeting saying that there would be new elections in accordance with the decision made by Yushchenko, but he later sharply criticized this decision. He said that there were three points in the President's decree that could be grounds for the Constitutional Court to declare it illegal, including the lack of mention of Article 90. He argued that negotiations were the only way out of the crisis. A Regions-OU alliance, without the Communists and BYuT, would provide much needed national unity; in his view, it would be a natural union because Regions and OU were on the right side of the political spectrum, while the others were on the left. Another OU member, EuroIntegration Committee Chairwoman Nataliya Propokovych, told the Codel that preterm elections were a bad idea because democratic forces would lose. Developing Law Enforcement Capabilities and Rada Oversight -------------- -------------- ¶8. (SBU) In one of the most substantive exchanges of the visit, Codel met with the chairmen of the Rada's three main legal/law enforcement-related committees to discuss oversight and deputies' immunity. Chairman of the Committee for Supporting Law Enforcement Agencies Volodymyr Stretovych (OU) said that Ukraine was a young democracy and it took time to build up a good law enforcement structure. One of the committee's basic efforts was to protect ordinary people from arbitrary attacks by law enforcement officials. Judiciary Committee Chairman Serhiy Kivalov (Regions) said that his committee had many concrete protects, including two key laws--on the Status of Judges and the Law of the Judiciary--which Yushchenko had submitted to the Rada. Kivalov had taken them to the Venice Commission in March, and they had received a positive review. (Note: The two bills were subsequently adopted in the first reading on April 3. End note.) In response to a question on how the Rada used oversight powers, Kivalov said that his committee was trying to improve parliamentary monitoring of legislation implementation and had tabled a law on this subject. ¶9. (SBU) Chairman of the Committee for Combating Organized Crime Mykola Dzhyha (Regions) said his committee was working on laws on the Prosecutor General's Office (PGO),Ministry of Interior (MOI),and Security Service (SBU). Dzhyha favored reconciling so many different organizations playing a role in fighting corruption, perhaps creating one new organization. On Rada MPs' wide-ranging immunity from prosecution, Stretovych said he was firmly in favor of canceling it outright. He said that when the 1996 constitution was written, the authors had tried to cancel immunity, but then-President Kuchma had fought to retain it. Stretovych added that when the Rada had voted in April 2006 to remove immunity from deputies at the local level granted by the Rada in September 2005, it had been hard to implement. However, Dzhyha added that the cancellation had made a difference in restoring some power to law enforcement organs. He also supported canceling MPs' immunity, but cautioned that it should be a consensus decision from within the Rada, not one made just for PR/image reasons. Security and Defense Committee: Striving for Professionalism -------------- -------------- KYIV 00000921 003 OF 003 ¶10. (SBU) At a lunch with three members from the Committee for National Security and Defense--Acting Chairman Yuriy Samoilenko (Regions),Lev Hnatenko (Kinakh group),and Oleh Antypov (BYuT)--the Codel covered a wide-range of topics, including oversight of the military and intelligence agencies. The three MPs boasted that the NSDC was the most apolitical committee in the Rada, because Ukraine's national security was too important to subject it to partisan bickering. In addition, 12 of the 17 members of the committee had background either in the military or in the security services, increasing the level of professionalism and expertise in the committee. The committee did hold closed door hearings to examine the actions of the MOD and SBU, and the committee was working on enhancing its oversight capability, but the MPs claimed that military was not often cooperative in letting the Rada observe what it was doing. Only around budget time did the MOD come calling. The committee members also pledged they would bring the annual foreign military exercise authorization bill, which would enable Partnership for Peace exercises to go forward, to the Rada for a floor vote the following day. (Note: Samoilenko did, but the bill fell victim to the political crisis and received only 5 votes in support. It successfully passed on April 6.) The MPs also asked about new funding for disposing of the rest of the solid motor fuel in Pavlograd. HDAC Chairman Price said that he hoped to have good news for the Rada on that front sometime this year. State Building Committee Trying to Decentralize Power -------------- -------------- ¶11. (SBU) Chairman Tykhonov (Regions),whose powerful State Building Committee controls important legislation such as the controversial CabMin law, stated that an important objective of his committee was to prepare a framework of laws that would make "(constitutional) reform irreversible." He said his committee was now focused on a law on local self-government; during the 2006 Rada election campaign, all parties courted local-level officials with promises of greater autonomy, but soon as the election was over, their approach changed. Nevertheless, he argued, the current system of centralized control was cumbersome and unworkable; Ukraine should move to a system of local control over budget and financing. For example, he complained that his native eastern Ukraine subsidized the relatively poorer western regions. Tykhonov also said that he favored a type of federalism for Ukraine and that he had "paid a high price" for his opinion. (Note: a possible reference to the criminal charges brought against him, later dropped for his advocacy of separatism during the Orange Revolution. Federalism is banned under the Ukrainian constitution. End note.) Tykhonov also advocated creating an Upper House of parliament to better represent the interests of Ukraine's oblasts (Note: similar to what exists in Russia, a federated state). Budget Committee Chairman Makeyenko -------------- ¶12. (SBU) Budget Committee Chairman Makeyenko (Regions) took pride in the fact that the 2007 budget and an amendment were both approved by the Rada and signed by Yushchenko; he argued that the budget addressed the needs of the people. Makeyenko commented on the difficulty of preventing members from using the budget process to line their own pockets and acknowledged that this had been a common practice. He remarked on the difficulties of being chairman of the 32-member committee (the largest in the Rada) and said he often "feels like a diplomat, not a legislator." He also said that in the past, budget impasses were frequently broken by appealing to the particular needs of single-mandate members, but the switch in 2006 to a Rada drawn entirely from party lists made compromise more difficult. He also noted that his committee was receiving assistance from the IMF and the World Bank to amend the Budget Code. His committee also cooperated with the Finance and Banking Committee to draft a new tax code that would reduce the role of the shadow economy, which now compromises up to 50% of Ukraine's economic activity, by some estimates. ¶13. (U) This cable has been cleared by Codel Price. ¶14. (U) Visit Embassy Kyiv's classified website: www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/kiev. Taylor