Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-25-Speech-3-287"
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"en.20070425.36.3-287"2
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".
Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, if the president of a state is to dissolve its parliament, it goes without saying that he has to do that in accordance with the rules laid down in that state’s constitution, and, just as President Yushchenko is perfectly entitled to do that under Article 90 of the Ukrainian constitution, which lays down in clear and precise terms the conditions under which a parliament can be dissolved, in the same way, the parliament itself has the right to appeal to the Constitutional Court and say that it takes a different view, that this article is not being applied consistently with the text of the constitution. That is why democratic societies have the separation of the powers, which guarantees that, at the end of the day, it is the judicial power that determines how the text is to be interpreted. That is, then, in the first instance, a legal opinion rather than a political one.
By the same token, any member of parliament is perfectly entitled to pass moral judgment on whether or not it is a good thing when members change sides, and I would like to remind you that groups in this House, too, have been formed and reformed, that members of it have left one group and joined another; such a thing is perfectly normal in many countries within the European Union.
Members of the Ukrainian parliament do not take instructions directly from those who elect them, and, for as long as that is the case, they can be required to take moral responsibility, but cannot be pursued in the courts.
Mrs Harms is right; there is a very considerable difference between Moscow and Kiev, and I would ask her to call to mind how the late Boris Yeltsin, when he was the Russian President, had troops fire on the Russian Parliament for not doing what he wanted it to do. That sort of thing is not happening in Ukraine, where there are democratic forces to prevent it, and a good job too!
What I find intermittently disturbing in this debate is that we are in too much of a hurry to pigeon-hole the rival parties, making the assumption that President Yushchenko is the one the European Union can do business with, that the Prime Minister, Mr Yanukovych, is Russia’s protégé and represents Russian interests, that it is obvious that the two are of different nationalities, the one being Ukrainian and the other Russian. The fact is, though, that they are both Ukrainian citizens and both of them represent that country’s interests; that they differ in their ideas as to how they should go about that is perfectly normal and is regarded as such in every Member State of the European Union.
I think, then, that there are four things we have to do. Firstly, we have to ask that the decision from the Constitutional Court be forthcoming in the immediate future. Secondly, we should be thinking and talking about the possibility of sending a delegation to Ukraine. Thirdly, it might also be possible to invite all the groups in the
to come here and have a debate. Fourthly, we could also invite the sparring protagonists to come here on the same day in order to debate the matter together; we do not want to have Mr Yanukovych coming here on one day, with Mrs Timoshenko arriving on the next, and Mr Yushchenko turning up the day after that, when what we want instead is a joint debate."@en1
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"Verkhovna Rada"1
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