Last week the Constitutional Court commenced open hearings
initiated under a referral of a group of Communist People's Deputies. However,
judging by the preliminary debate, the issue of constitutionality of the
parliamentary decisions outlawing the CPU may well place the latter-day
Leninists into a do-or-die situation.
The crucial point of the judicial inquest is based on the records of
the Verkhovna Rada ad hoc committee investigating the actions of officeholders
in Ukraine in conjunction with the coup of August 19-21, 1991. Headed by
Yuri Haisynsky, then a lawmaker and now a lawyer, the committee supplied
findings which served as the basis for the ban.
Yet the reporting judge, Vasyl Nymchenko, publicly declared that the
court has no such documents. According to the Communist petition, the CPU
will most likely agree to the necessity of questioning witnesses involved
in banning the party (e.g., Leonid Kravchuk and Ivan Pliushch who signed
the decrees, along with Yuri Haisynsky and Viktor Shyshkin, then Procurator
General of Ukraine).
In other words, the sensational hearings, put off for two years, promise
to turn into the trial of the century coming to an end. Ukraine's number
one Communist declared that, despite the delay and the possibility of bias
on the part of Constitutional Court Chief Justice Ivan Tymchenko (Leonid
Kravchuk's legal advisor at the time), he and his comrades count on a positive
ruling. The more so that they are struggling for a tangible cause. Comrade
Symonenko confirmed, in an interview with The Day, that if they
win in court the party will claim damages for the "brain, honor, and conscience"
(as Lenin called the Party - Ed.) of the departing epoch.






