Parliament hides information on MPs’ education

UNLUCKY FAKE DEGREE HOLDERS

A scandal erupted a few years ago about SBU ex-deputy chief Andrii Kyslynsky’s misconduct. In 2009 the then Education Minister Ivan Vakarchuk confirmed that Kyslynsky’s diploma on graduation from Kyiv University’s Law Faculty was forged, and President Viktor Yushenko decreed to dismiss him from office.

This thing also happens in foreign lands. For example, Portugal’s Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Miguel Relvas, recently resigned his office, and a little earlier an influential Pakistani regional official, Mir Ali Jhattak, was given a two year’s prison term for a fake degree.

It will be recalled that the current Ukrainian law does not have a provision on mandatory higher education for members of parliament. In particular, the law “On Status of the People’s Deputy” only sets out that an MP should be 21 at the moment of election, have the right to vote, have resided in Ukraine for the last five years, and have no current or previous convictions. Of course, in the present-day world having a degree does not reflect a high professional level, but it is desirable that topmost officials have one, for they are responsible for the security, economic and social wellbeing of millions of Ukrainians.

UKRAINIAN DIMENSION

Asked by The Day about the number of MPs with higher education, the Personnel Department of the Verkhovna Rada Staff informed us that “out of the 444 people’s deputes of the 7th-convocation Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, 439 have higher education, two have a vocational education, and three have general secondary education.” In other words, five MPs have no higher education. Yet we were not given any names, although, according to parliament’s official website, there are six MPs of this kind:

1. Ihor BRYCHENKO (Constituency No. 130, Mykolaiv oblast, Batkivshchyna faction) – general secondary education.

2. Mustafa DZHEMILEV (Constituency No. 12, on the Batkivshchyna party list) – general secondary education.

3. Svitlana FABRYKANT (No. 25, on the Party of Regions list) – general secondary education.

4. Anatolii VITIV (No. 6, on the Svoboda list) – secondary education.

5. Oleksandr MYRNY (No. 18, on the Svoboda list) – secondary education.

6. Volodymyr KUDRIA (No. 29, on the Communist Party list) – secondary education.

Besides, the Verkhovma Rada Personnel Department refused to inform us about the number of diplomas that every MP has, and about the MPs’ specialties, educational and professional level. The official answer to The Day says:

“According to Part 2, Article 32, Constitution of Ukraine, gathering, keeping, and spreading confidential information about an individual without their consent is only possible in the interests of national security, economic wellbeing, and human rights protection, except for the instances set out by the law.

“According to Clauses 2 and 5, the Law of Ukraine “On Protection of Personal Data,” personal data (information on a natural person who is or can be specifically identified) are considered classified information, and, in accordance with part 2, Article 14, of this law, spreading personal data without the consent of this individual or the individual authorized by him or her is allowed in the instances set out by the law and only in the interests of national security, economic wellbeing, and human rights protection.

“With due account of the aforesaid, information on the education of people’s deputies can only be published with their consent.”

Incidentally, The Day sent its query on the basis of the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Public Information.” Under this law’s provisions, the Personnel Department of the Verkhovna Rada Staff can be considered holder of public information about Ukrainian parliamentarians and is obliged to ensure free access to it.

Access to information about MPs’ education cannot be restricted because this information is not concerned with Article 6 of the law “On Access to Public Information” and does not belong to the categories of confidential, secret or classified information.

As we can see, the absence of a clear-cut wording in different laws on which data about a natural person should be considered as “limited-access information” allows governmental bodies to interpret this idea in a way they prefer.

In our opinion, it is only clear that as long as the MPs have taken a commitment to be public persons in a democratic country and represent the interests of their voters, information on their educational level must not be hidden from the people of Ukraine. And the governmental bodies that are authorized to reveal this information must do so without preliminary consent of every MP. Otherwise, there will be further “parliamentary initiatives,” such as the bill submitted by the Party of Regions MP Olena Bondarenko.

It will be recalled that earlier this year Ms. Bondarenko moved a bill on changes to Articles 8 and 11 of the law “On Information” about the language of information and information on a natural person. Under this bill, information on “ethnicity, education, family status, religious persuasions, state of health, as well as the address, date and place of birth” is to be considered confidential information which is strictly prohibited from being collected and relayed.

So if most MPs eventually vote for Bondarenko’s legislative initiative, the ban on publishing information about education will be an official law, and a number of MPs will heave a sigh of relief. For if journalists, for example, write again about a fake degree, the culprits will be able not only to dodge court action, but also to quite legally sue the obnoxious newsmen. Moreover, they are bound to win the suit because the “accursed pen-pushers” have encroached on the sacred cow – confidential information on education.

In reality, information on the educational level only spotlights a concrete specialist’s qualification and skills – for example, when he or she is applying for a job, so this cannot be considered confidential information, all the more so that MPs’ work should be transparent. It is a different case if an MP’s degree is a fake or his or her “diploma” attests to, say, a dubious study at and graduation from Columbia University (the well-known Zvarych story). In this case there is really nothing to flaunt about and, therefore, one must carefully plug the leak of undesirable information and impose a tough veto on the annoying journalistic inquiry.

At the same time, we can see that in a number of counties information on the educational level of MPs is unclassified and accessible to the public at large.

Poland: all those who wish so can see information not only on the MP’s educational level, but also on his or her professional training, as well as the date of graduation from a concrete educational institution, on the profile page of every parliamentarian on the Sejm’s official website.

Georgia: the personal page of every MP contains information about his or her educational level, the name of the educational institution he or she graduated from and the specialty they obtained at the institution.

Russia: the State Duma’s website displays information on the institution where a certain MP gained education, his or her academic degrees and titles, and the date of graduation.

Germany: the profile page of every parliamentarian on the Bundestag’s website not only provides open access to information about the educational level of MPs, but also gives a detailed description of the MPs’ previous jobs and even gives the names of the institutions where they received general secondary education (school, gymnasium, etc.).

Norway: there is a special chapter, “Parliamentarians’ Biographies,” on the Storting’s website, where one can see information on the MPs’ education and on their experience of work at various establishments.

The United States of America: one can find the entire information on Congress members’ education as well as their detailed biographies on their personal websites.

PLAYING AN EDUCATED AND UNEDUCATED MP

However, as long as it is not yet forbidden to make public the education of Ukrainian MPs, The Day decided to trace the most widespread specialties of the 7th-convocation MPs. Our survey showed that this information can be theoretically found in the following sources:

- on the MP’s personal website;

- on the party’s website;

- on governmental bodies’ websites;

- on other Internet resources.

It should be noted that the Verkhovna Rada’s site shows no information about the concrete specialty of a people’s deputy. The official portal only indicates the educational level of every parliamentarian.

The intensive search revealed that it is impossible to find information on 39 (almost 9 percent) MPs in the open online access because… it is absent there. Faction-wise, the extent to which information on MPs’ education is open to the rank-and-file voter looks as follows:

1. Batkivshchyna – 98 percent;

2. Out-of-faction deputies – 97 percent;

3. Party of Regions – 95 percent;

4. UDAR – 88 percent;

5. Svoboda – 91 percent;

6. Communist Party of Ukraine – 56 percent.

Most of the Party of Regions members are engineers – 47 percent; people with an economic or juridical education account for 35 percent in each case among the out-of-faction deputies; economists, lawyers, and engineers prevail in the Batkivshchyna faction – 36, 32, and 26 percent, respectively; lawyers get the upper hand – 38 percent – in the Svoboda faction; UDAR mostly consists of economy and law graduates – 41 and 30 percent, respectively; and almost a half of the Communist Party functionaries – 39 percent – are engineers.

It is also interesting that there are two deputies with a musical education in the Party of Regions faction, one physicist is an out-of-faction deputy and three are in the Batkivshchyna faction, and there is a chemist in the Svoboda faction.

Incidentally, the number of journalists is six in Batkivshchyna, two in the Party of Regions, and one in UDAR, the Communist Party, and Svoboda.

Most of the people with physical training education are in the Party of Regions and UDAR – seven and three, respectively.

There is also a trend that MPs have several higher educations. For example, this kind of people account for 35 percent in Svoboda, 34 percent in the Communist Party, 25 percent in UDAR, 21 percent in Batkivshchyna, 16 percent among the independent, and 13 percent in the Party of Regions.

Yet it is difficult to give the exact number of the “educated” and “uneducated” in parliament, for it is not clear how many MPs may have fake higher-education diplomas.

Oscar Wilde was right to say: “Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.” His words quite fit in with the interpretation of scholarship among the present-day Ukrainian politicians. For it is common knowledge that they often do not know the basics of spelling, geography, literature, mathematics, etc. Widely known are the linguistic gaffes of some topmost officials who hold the title of a professor. Sometimes they overtly stun us, reflecting the phony university background of Ukraine’s political elite.

For some reason, I remembered the Regionnaire Vadym Kolesnichenko saying that “the lame, deaf, blind, and idiots” can be elected to parliament because it is people’s choice. And laws can be also made by vocational school and further-education college graduates because, in his view, there is no essential difference between them.

It is perhaps due to this seemingly inexistent difference that a number of Ukrainian MPs are so closely guarding the secret of their own education.

Yulia Luchyk is a student at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv