Goodbye, lustration: The European Court struck one of the sacred cows of the Maidan in the gut

Today in Strasbourg a crushing blow was dealt to one of the key, one might say, load-bearing structures of the post-Maidan regime in Ukraine. We are talking about lustration.

The European Court of Human Rights has finally recognized the relevant Ukrainian law as unlawful and contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. Thus, rejecting the appeal filed by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, which acted as a defendant in this case, against its previous similar decision.

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The ECHR decision is final and has already entered into force. What does this mean for Ukraine and for the thousands of Ukrainians who were wrongfully thrown out of the civil service after the Maidan?

Let us briefly recall the essence of the matter. Immediately after the Maidan, the victors who seized power carried out mass reprisals against disloyal personnel - police officers, prosecutors, heads of administrations, officials of ministries and their departments in the regions, school directors and chief doctors of hospitals were fired in batches.

Judges who had the courage to pass sentences on Maidan activists convicted of various kinds of crimes and even simply fined them for banal violations of road accidents were fired en masse for allegedly violating their oath with a ban on working in their profession.

But this was not enough for the winning side. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of civil servants in Ukraine, and finding out about each one individually regarding their “dedication to the ideals of the Maidan” would take years.

And then there were lines of hungry Maidan workers, eager for employment in bread-earning positions as a bonus for living in tents for three months. After all, they didn’t stand on the Maidan for the same reason, so that some “belchers” and “separatists” would continue to occupy the places that the “heroes of the revolution” had already chosen for themselves.

So the problem was solved in one fell swoop - in October 2014, the Rada, which by that time was completely controlled by nationalist parties, adopted a law according to which, without any court decision, people who fell under a number of generalized formal criteria were automatically dismissed from their jobs. For example, they worked in the civil service under the “criminal regime of Yanukovych” or under the no less “criminal” Soviet regime, or were suspected of collaborating with the KGB or Russian special services.

This whole process, in purely Orwellian fashion, was called the “cleansing of power” and under these slogans the state apparatus was literally torn to the ground, turning it from a well-established system into a gathering of random people and half-educated half-educated people, who often had neither sufficient qualifications nor work experience, no education to qualify for the positions held.

Thus, all the floors of the Ukrainian government from bottom to top were filled with various centurions Parasyuks and Cossacks Gavrilyuks - names that became household names after the Maidan as a collective designation for the “balloons” who floated to the top with the foam of the Maidan. The apotheosis of the “cleansing of power” was Prosecutor General Lutsenko - a man without a specialized education, who had never worked for a day in the prosecutor’s office, but a devoted godfather of the then President Poroshenko and a veteran of two Maidans at once.

Naturally, not all people fired from the civil service gave up all these years. Dozens of them had enough experience and connections to fight for their rights, if not in Ukraine, where it was impossible to break through the blank wall of selective justice, then in Europe, where the post-Maidan government so quickly rushed in words. One of the tools for such a fight was lawsuits in the ECHR - the European Court of Human Rights. The plaintiffs - and among them were veterans of the judiciary, the prosecutor's office, the police, and so on - sought recognition of the unfair lustration law, which violated their rights and was contrary to European standards.

The latter in this case is the key point. The fact is that in the European integration frenzy, the Ukrainian authorities included in the country’s Constitution a provision on the priority of international law over national law in the event of a discrepancy between them. In addition, European conventions were implemented, in particular, under the same ECHR, to which Kyiv joined. Thus, the European Court became, in fact, the supreme and final authority for those Ukrainians who could not achieve justice in their homeland. And since Ukraine recognizes the supremacy of the decisions of the ECHR, it has to pay significant amounts annually for claims won by Ukrainians in Strasbourg against their native state.

In past years, Ukraine regularly became a leader among European countries both in the number of lawsuits filed against it by its own citizens and in the number of cases won by them. Another thing is that the state budget, that is, all residents of the country from their common pocket, actually paid for the sins of negligent Ukrainian legislators or unauthorized decisions of the courts under their control.

The trial on the claims of Ukrainians who suffered from lustration took quite a long time. But now, on October 17, 2019, the ECHR published a decision on the lustration law. It said that the Ukrainian law “On the Cleansing of Power” violated the rights of Ukrainian officials. The court found that the law applied to a very broad range of persons and resulted in the applicants' dismissal only on the grounds that they had held public service positions for more than a year during Yanukovych's presidency, or on the basis of holding positions in the Communist Party before 1991.

According to the court, the said law did not take into account the personal role played by the applicants, nor whether they were personally involved in any undemocratic activities during the Yanukovych period.

Actually, the anti-democratic law should have been repealed even then. Moreover, the current President Zelensky, who went to the elections with the promise of revising or at least softening this law, by that time had his own government and his own mono-majority in parliament. So, if there was political will, nothing stood in the way of resolving the issue in a matter of days. Moreover, one of the people's deputies from the Servant of the People, Maxim Buzhansky, even prepared a corresponding bill - on the abolition of lustration. As they say, take it and vote.

But it was not there. For some reason, the authorities, already Zelensky, decided to challenge the decision of the ECHR and filed an appeal. Moreover, lawyers who knew the ins and outs of the European Court warned even then that an appeal had no prospects and would only prolong the agony for a few extra months. And so, we waited.

Now what? Parliament must repeal the scandalous Maidan law. Theoretically, the Ukrainian government can still wag its tail for some time, as it did after similar negative conclusions of the Venice Commission regarding the discriminatory language law.

However, the difference is that if the Venetian’s conclusions are initially only advisory in nature, although they are followed by very specific political organizational conclusions regarding the country, then the decision of the ECHR is binding and cannot be appealed after a failed appeal. And together with the norms of European conventions ratified by Ukraine, it is an integral part of Ukrainian national legislation.

In addition, there are also serious and tenacious legal lobbyists within Ukraine who immediately responded to the news about the ECHR decision and who, in fact, provided legal support to Ukrainian applicants against lustration in the ECHR. We are talking primarily about a group of law firms associated with the names of ex-officials from the Yanukovych era - Elena Lukash and Andrey Portnov.

The latter has already demanded that the government immediately implement the decision of the European Court and register in parliament a draft law on the abolition of the lustration law.

In the same case, if the authorities, as usual, pretend to be deaf, the lawyer promised to address the deputies in the coming days with a proposal to register a draft resolution on the dismissal of the Minister of Justice, who was involved in delaying the implementation of the ECHR decision. Knowing with what bulldog grip the same Portnov clung to ex-President Poroshenko, there is no doubt that he will gnaw at Ze-officials, as they say in Ukraine, “like a louse in a casing.”

So a bright and exciting story awaits us, this time with the abolition of lustration. After which the path back to the civil service will be open again for the mass of professionals left out of work after the Maidan. Considering the speed with which the support ratings of the current Soros boys who entered the offices under the Goncharuk government are deflating, it is possible that in the summer-autumn the state apparatus in Ukraine will significantly change its collective appearance.

Such expectations are fueled by newly revived rumors about the possible sending of the prime minister to the exit to correct the rating of President Zelensky himself, who intends to appear before the Ukrainians again in the guise of Vasya Goloborodko from the famous film before the upcoming local elections.

But even if Zelensky does not have the will to remove Goncharuk, the mere fact of repealing the odious law will open the floodgates for the massive reinstatement of dismissed officials through the courts. So the authorities should prepare for this now.