Natalya Vitrenko's failed re-entry to big politics

One of the longest-serving females in Ukraine’s politics, and also one of the loudest ones, left-wing Natalia Vitrenko is missing from the list of presidential candidates this year. It’s not for lack of her trying, but rather because of a curious legal and political glitch.

The leader of radical left-wing and oppositional Progressive Socialist Party (who stands for a reunion of Ukraine with Russia and Belarus) attempted to go around the system of registration of candidates introduced by the new presidential election law last summer.

The world has two main principles of selecting candidates for top state jobs. The first one is collection of the citizens’ signatures in support of the potential presidential candidates. The second one is an election deposit.

Until recently Ukraine adhered to the first model of filtering down the numbers: The person desiring to become a presidential candidate had to collect a certain number of signatures and present them to the Central Election Committee. It’s curious that in Ukraine’s case some of the candidates sometimes received fewer votes during the actual elections than the number of signatures they presented to the election authority.

To avoid such absurdities, recently Ukraine chose the second way by requiring a deposit to be placed by the start of the official registration procedure. The first drafts of the new presidential election law envisaged a deposit worth Hr 10 million. But in the process of debate the Verkhovna Rada reduced it to Hr 2.5 million. The deposit will only be returned to those candidates who make it to the second round.

This requirement that made candidates cough up a sum by no means small in the eyes of an average Ukrainian citizen, became the stumbling block for Vitrenko on the way to her electoral Eldorado.

It’s not very clear why Vitrenko only deposited Hr 1,964 instead of the required Hr 2.5 million. Possibly, there is a connection with the data from the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine that says the average salary in Ukraine in September was exactly Hr 1,964.

There may have been other reasons why this peculiar sum was chosen as a deposit, but the fact is that Vitrenko’s electoral deposit was significantly smaller than what is required by law for the Central Election Committee to be able to register a citizen as a presidential candidate.

Based on this shortage, the CEC on Nov. 11 issued a resolution denying Vitrenko’s registration as a presidential candidate. Following an established tradition, the resolution was then appealed against in a newly established administrative court, which, in turn, refused to commence an action after having found nothing illegal in CEC’s behavior.

The reasons Vitrenko gave for challenging the CEC are very curious. Ukraine, like any other lawful state, is governed by the principle of supremacy of its constitution. It means that the constitution is the document that establishes the main rules, and if any law changes these rules it has to be recognized unconstitutional and canceled.

This is the basis that Vitrenko used to argue her desired registration as a candidate: The constitution establishes the main requirements that have to be met by a presidential candidate, but it fails to mention anything about money.

In other words, introduction of an electoral deposit is not required by the constitution. Therefore, the law that makes it a requirement cannot be used, according to Vitrenko.

Typically, the Ukrainian courts treat this type of cases very similarly. They law has to be observed, and if somebody considers it unconstitutional, the issue can only be solved by the Constitutional Court. The law in question is considered valid until pronounced otherwise, and its violation is illegal.

The Constitutional Court had already considered legality of an electoral deposit in 2002. The Constitutional Court effectively duplicated international practice by saying the electoral deposit is not used to limit the rights of citizens to become a presidential candidate, but to make them treat this right more responsibly and not abuse their opportunity to run in elections.

A natural question comes up: Why did Vitrenko decide to take such a hopeless step from thelegal point of view? What was she counting on, attaching a receipt that indicated she made a smaller deposit than that required by law?

It may have been due to excessive presumptiveness of Vitrenko and her entourage, or the desire to – once again – exploit the image of a persecuted oppositionist, thus making her legal conflict seem like a political conflict with those in power.

Whatever idea was behind this move, its effect was close to none.

KyivPost

23/12/2009

http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/55790/