Freedom and law

Sixty years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This documents sets forth the fundament rights, including the right to life, liberty, education, employment, and so on. But do we Ukrainians know our rights and how to defend them? How is the postgenocidal nature of our society affecting Ukraine’s progress as a rule-of-law state? What amendments must be made to the Con­stitution of Ukraine? The Day po­sed these questions in the following in­terview with Dr. My­ro­slav Ma­rynovych, a veteran hu­man rights champion and deputy rector of the Ukrainian Catholic Uni­ver­sity.

Dr. Marynovych, what is your understanding of human rights? Are there any that Ukrainians are lacking?

“To me, human rights mean an ability to love fellow humans, understand their problems, and have a sense of empathy. Jesus Christ taught about coming to the sick and those in prison or in hardship. At one time I astonished my friends by deriving the genesis of human rights from Jesus’ commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

“As for today’s Ukraine, it no longer has the most brutal violations of human rights as it did in the past, yet there is still the main problem of Soviet-now post-Soviet-society: lack of respect for human dignity. The individual means nothing to the state, except as a cog in the government machine. S/he can be ignored. However, everything based on disregard for human dignity turns into concrete violations of human rights. Here it is difficult to distinguish between them, for they range from infringements of the freedom of expression to those of economic rights. In actuality, the whole range of human rights is disregarded.”

Dr. James Mace once tagged our society as a postgenocidal one. How has this status affected Ukraine’s progress as a rule-of-law state?

“I often mention this syndrome to my foreign colleagues who expect Ukraine to behave in as balanced manner as Great Britain, for example. They are not too eager to consider our historical problems in great detail or take into account that ours is a postgenocidal, posttraumatic nation.”

“What regards a rule-of-law state, other factors are also involved. It is very easy to blame the past, but our contemporaries are also to blame. We have not succeeded in implementing the supremacy of law in nearly twenty years of our [national] independence.”

“What I mean is that horrible things happened under the communist regime. After Ukraine won its independence in 1991, the old elite was afraid for a while that all secrets would be revealed, but then its past sins were actually written off. After that the unrepentant elite started to commit new crimes. Those perpetrated under Leonid Kuchma were possible because the mechanism of the supremacy of law was not activated in the early 1990s.

And then Viktor Yushchenko’s motto “Bandits Must Be In Prison!” sounded only logical. It is a popular formula of the supremacy of law. All our present hardships and disregard for law are here because we can’t bring the guilty to justice.”

Dr. Marynovych, you were among the initiators of the Concerned Citizens’ Memorandum that proposed a constitutional assembly to shape the fundamental law. What kind of amendments should be made to the Constitution of Ukraine?

“The Constitution of Ukraine was finally thrown out of balance during the Orange revolution. It was not perfect before that either but the reform made at the time only aggravated the situation. Frankly, I am outraged by Oleksandr Moroz who refuses to admit his personal guilt even now, witnessing the consequences of his initiative.

“The current constitution’s main fault is the total unbalance of powers. Today the main task is to eliminate this. Our parliament cannot do this; as a branch of power, it will invariably pursue its own ends. Likewise, our president cannot be trusted with fulfilling this task. It can only be carried out by an independent authority capable of analyzing the interrelations between the branches of power. The Constitutional Assembly is precisely this kind of authority. The proposed idea is age-old. The problem is in finding responsible members and making sure they will have no right to hold important government posts or seats in parliament for at least ten years afterward-in other words, making sure they will work without any personal interests in mind.”

Under the Soviets, the dissidents demanded that the government secure the rights laid down in the Constitution of the USSR, among other things. This situation somehow reminds the one we have now, when the human guaranteed by the Constitution of Ukraine cannot be realized. Consider, for example, the pickets by the owners of land plots in front of the Kyiv City Council — their plots are being taken from them by developers for a pittance. These pickets are few and far between, so not many people pay attention to them.

“The way human rights are defended has changed since Soviet times. At the time one had to tell about everything, actually calling into question the entire system and being in opposition to everything that took place in society. Now the situation is different; it is necessary to defend human rights in specific directions. You offered a good example. I can add to it by mentioned the efforts of the Public Forum in Lviv that monitors the performance of municipal authorities, focusing on problems where their actions contradict the law, thereby defending Lvivites’ human rights. Why is all this still ineffective? This question is equal to another one, Why is our civil society still weak?”

There are many definitions of a civil society. What is yours? Do you think it applies to all countries?

“I have a metaphor, not a formula. A civil society is a safety cushion that prevents the government machine from crushing the man in the street. Independent NGOs, mass media, and even the church are part of this cushion. In the early 1990s, a number of NGOs emerged in Ukraine, but the government immediately realized that they were another pain in the neck and proceeded to get them under control. Some were granted government financing, others evicted from their premises, and still others faced with tax authorities or destroyed within by government-hired agent provocateurs.

“At present, Ukraine’s civil society is strong enough to prevent the recurrence of the Russian kind of authoritarianism, although it apparently lags behind modern democracy standards. Naturally, a civil society is a universal phenomenon, except that the thickness of that ‘safety cushion’ varies in each case. That is why we distinguish between democratic, authoritarian, and despotic states. Ukraine appears to be somewhere in the middle.”

How would you describe the role being played by the church in today’s Ukraine?

“We came out of the communist anticivilization; we are spiritually traumatized. Whereas the communist regime fed on the spiritual potential accumulated during previous epochs, what we have now is immorality accumulated during the Soviet epoch. This is something that disturbs me a great deal. I can see manifestations of a spiritual crisis everywhere, in politics, economy, and culture. Therefore, I attach special importance to the church as an institution that at least declares the supremacy of spiritual problems. However, our church has its own problems. It has also suffered from insane communist experiments. It needs time to recuperate.”

It is obviously hard for young people to realize that the entire Soviet society was paralyzed by fear. One could lose one’s career or even end up in jail for signing a statement from citizens to the authorities or for corresponding with political prisoners. Do you think that our young people need this kind of knowledge? How can it serve them?

“I am convinced that Ukrainians should know the theory of human rights and how to defend their rights. However, it is important to make sure that all this is kept in the legal domain. In my lectures on the subject I sometimes draw an apple tree with a rich crown and thick roots. I call it the tree of violated human rights. If we give people nothing but theoretical knowledge, we keep shaking apples from the branches of this tree by saying that they are rotten and have to be dumped. But next year this tree will bear the same kind of fruit. ”

“Therefore, we must give people something in addition to theoretical knowledge; we must teach them how to get to the roots where human interests are. In other words, we must convince them that anyone who steals anything from, or otherwise humiliates, a fellow human thus deprives this person of his/her innate rights, and that this makes the situation worse for everybody, the whole society. We are badly in need of this kind of knowledge. So far Ukrainian society is teeming with egotists who do not give a hoot about fellow humans and care about their own interests only.”

“Regarding the knowledge about past violations of human rights, it is necessary to share it with our posterity. Otherwise we will hear something like I heard from a student in Lviv (not Luhansk!) who asked, ‘Mr. Marynovych, do you really think that Soviet times were so bad?’ This left me speechless and I realized that we have to tell our young people about our painful past, otherwise the next generation will not understand us.”