Laughter and tears on the Internet
The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in our lives. Yet no one knows what dirty trick will be played next in cyberspace. Proof of this is the recent stunt that was pulled off by some hackers, who broke into a broadcast highlighting the advantages of the US missile defense system being set up in Eastern European countries and then generated a very convincing image of a nuclear blast.
Something like this happened at the Presidential Secretariat in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago (at least they tried to make it look like that). Presidential decrees appeared on the official Web site of the head of state, cancelling his previous formal dismissals of justices of the Constitutional Court and relieving them of their duties in keeping with their tendered resignations. The press service described the whole affair as a malfunction resulting from testing being done on the Web site, apologized, and asked visitors to consider the decrees issued on April 30 and May 10 as the only valid ones.
Visitors to various Internet forums and chats almost split their sides laughing and offered their own explanations. Interestingly, no one blamed hackers, although this would have suited the press service much better than the alleged malfunction. Well, my colleagues there should have known better and attributed the whole thing to hackers. They should have announced that the SBU is investigating the case, and the public may have soon forgotten all about it.
According to sober-minded activists at various Web sites, people at the secretariat must have realized that the decrees firing CC judges were illegal and decided to correct the situation by applying almost the same pattern used when some decrees were canceled and new ones dissolving parliament were signed. The documents were prepared and probably even signed. Otherwise they would have never appeared on the site, testing or no testing.
Another possibility is that the judges in question reconsidered at the last moment and refused to tender their resignations. However, what bothers the Internet-using and journalist communities the most? We have become practically inured to our leadership playing games that violate the law. (In a report analyzing some 1,400 presidential and 4,900 cabinet acts between the start of 2006 and June 2007, the Verkhovna Rada’s ad hoc commission stated that the president issued 174 such acts containing clauses that contradict the constitution and relating to matters not within his jurisdiction.) What bothers us is why they respect us so little that they don’t even try to come up with more or less plausible explanations.
Lies always surface eventually. On June 19, CC Justice Valerii Pshenychny almost entirely confirmed the Internet version of what happened on the presidential Web site. He said he signed a statement to the effect that the first of the decrees relieving him of his post must be annulled because he considered it to be unlawful, but that he had tendered no resignation. Privy to all the circumstances of this case, the judge added that the last two decrees (the ones canceling the previous presidential edict relieving him of his post) did not take effect because they were not published in Visnyk Prezydenta (The President’s Herald).
What about that malfunction? Will the press service have to apologize again, this time for deliberately leading the Ukrainian public astray and humiliating a respected justice of the Constitutional Court?
This example proved to be contagious. Recently Ukrainian border guard officials resorted to the “lawful” but extremely humiliating act of forcing a pregnant woman and her three-year-old daughter off the train for the sole reason that the child’s birth certificate had been issued in Transdnistria, which is not formally recognized. Yet we love to use every occasion to describe ourselves as humanists and take our children to public events. We talk a lot about protecting children’s rights and repeat the adage about the tear down a child’s face against which all the blessings of the world are powerless. Those border guards were unmoved by the tears of that mother and her child.
Something is rotten in the state of Ukraine. Not coincidentally, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced on June 19 that criminal proceedings are underway in more than 40 cases following verification of the way legislation is being respected in the sphere of the protection of public morals. The PGO’s press service reported that the militia’s youth squads are not performing adequately. There is an increasing number of crimes among schoolchildren, which damage adolescents’ honor and dignity, like the use of cell phones to send live video feeds to friends or even to the Internet. I wonder how the PGO will respond to what those pitiless border guard officials did — for whom senseless orders are more important than a tear rolling down a child’s face.
