Freedom and Censorship

The December 4 parliamentary hearings on the media and censorship, given gavel-to-gavel coverage on UT-1, constituted a major service to the citizens of this country and to all those who want to understand an issue made incredibly complicated by the post-Soviet states’ short historical experience in dealing with the actual content of how laws actually work in the West and what rights are all about. Anyone with access to a television set could tune in, and this is itself an indication of movement toward the Euro-Atlantic community that this state has announced its determination to integrate with.

The tone was set by my former colleague and chair of the Political Science Department at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University, now head of the parliamentary committee most directly concerned with this issue, Mykola Tomenko. While I have not always agreed with all of his findings, his past work as vice president of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, member (also along with me) of the editorial board of the trilingual Political Thought, and director of the Institute of Politics (inter alia) over the years has established him as one of Ukraine’s leading political researchers. He has also had some success in getting those Western grants, which some evidently believe are directed at creating problems where they do not exist. However, anyone familiar with the process of awarding such grants in these parts is aware that there are quite enough problems in all the postcommunist states without making up new ones. The point is that one must take very seriously Mykola’s presentation pointing out a pervasive system of informal censorship on all levels and-insofar as possible — spelling out precisely how it works.

Of course, Vice Premier Dmytro Tabachnyk was also absolutely correct in pointing out that under existing Ukrainian legislation official censorship is practically ruled out. The laws that exist are even better than one might expect in a country at this stage in its transition from the communist old regime. However, laws are not only words but how those words are understood, and that understanding changes over time. The US Constitution, written in 1787, has been changed less than thirty times, but what that document has been taken to mean has evolved tremendously.

The problems aired in the recent hearings are crucial to Ukraine’s evolution toward — perhaps even learning what — the real content is of that which it is striving to evolve into.