CEC refuses to registerTymoshenko & Lutsenko – what next?
On 8 August the Central Election Commission registered the United Opposition’s candidate list but without the leader of the Batkivshchyna Party Yulia Tymoshenko and the former Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko. Oleksandr Chernenko, Head of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine [CVU] says that the United Opposition will probably appeal against the CEC decision however it is already clear that neither of the two imprisoned politicians will take part in the October parliamentary elections.
According to Deputy Head of the CEC Zhanna Usenko-Chorna, both Tymoshenko and Lutsenko wrote in their biographical details that they have politically motivated criminal convictions. She explained that the CEC does not have the authority to give a legal assessment of court rulings, and under such conditions it does not have grounds for registering them.
Earlier the opposition argued that the grounds for participation by Tymoshenko in the elections could be a judgement from the European Court of Human Rights. According to the Head of the United Opposition Council, Arseny Yatsenyuk, for this it’s needed that Tymoshenko’s imprisonment is found to be politically motivated.
However Oleksandr Chernenko points out that in Lutsenko’s case, the European Court of Human Rights found the fact of the former Interior Minister’s detention to be politically motivated, but it has not (yet) given an opinion as to his conviction and sentencing.
„Obviously we all understand that we are dealing here with political persecution. However the CEC went by the norms of the current Law on the Parliamentary Elections, whether we like it or not”.
He adds that they can appeal against the CEC decision in the High Administrative Court, but since both Tymoshenko and Lutsenko presently have current convictions, they can’t be registered as candidates. This was all predictable, he stresses, and does not think there were any surprises for the opposition either.
From a report at Radio Svoboda