This written declaration commits only those who have signed it.
Every Council of Europe member State accepts that its own
citizens’ will is the only source of power. Each country’s parliament
is directly elected by citizens. Thus the members elected are direct
representatives of the people, whose will is the only source of
power.
Recent events in Ukraine call into question Ukraine’s compliance
with this basic principle. In this context there have been two different
decisions of the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine which arbitrarily
deprived of the parliamentary seats to which they had been elected
on the basis of majority voting Oleksandr Dombrovskyy, Pavlo Baloha
and Serhiy Vlasenko, elected on the basis of the lists of the Batkivshchyna
party, currently in opposition. At the same time, the court decisions
regarding Dombrovskyy and Baloha have not been fully implemented.
Vlasenko has been deprived of his mandate, and the Central Elections
Committee has put in his place a new member of parliament from the
Batkivshchyna party list.
We express our extreme concern about these processes in Ukraine,
which conflict with the basic principles of democracy.
We urge the Ukrainian authorities to desist from their direct
violations of the rules accepted by Ukraine when it joined the Council
of Europe.
