Now here is a question that all foreign policy planners face on a regular basis.
Do you engage and try and change things from within the system or do you opt out and make statements from afar which have very little effect?
If you engage and try to change things from within, what is the cost, both tangible and transparent or hidden and more opaque?
Do you put a time line on your efforts from within or do you attempt to move the existing forces, even if glacially, towards your desired goals?
How do you measure it and how do those measurements justify (or not) the effort and expense you put in?
What will be deemed as successful and what will be deemed failure?
Do you deem success as a bilateral success or as a supra-structural success if both are not necessarily the same thing?
Do you benchmark success by specific cases, let’s take the case of Ms Tymoshenko’s trial as a specific, and whilst gaining the outcome you may want to see is a success, the rest of the Ukrainian society suffers from the same old system, or do you benchmark a general improvement for Ukrainian society as success even if Ms Tymoshenko’s trial does not give you the desired outcome (despite its high profile)?
As there are EU diplomats sitting in on the Tymoshenko trial, should the EU push for OSCE styled observers to have free access to any trial in Ukraine for monitoring purposes to build up a picture of something more reliable than straw poll public perception? Monitors do not have to be lawyers any more than OSCE election monitors have to from any particular walk of life.
Would I sit in on random trials in Odessa and report back to a PACE/EU/UK (whatever) collating body that would provide more than a straw poll public perception survey? Of course I would. I have nothing better to do and I would consider it something of a duty firstly to the Ukrainian population I live within and secondly to the structure that requested me to do it.
Likewise I would act as an OSCE election observer for the same reasons. I would also act as a “layperson visitor” visiting jails or police stations on a monitoring basis for human rights issues. There is very little I can do for Ukrainian society (or the UK for that matter) here, but there are some things I can do and would be happy to do.
Why am I writing this and what has it got to do with the title of this post? Here is your answer:
The Council of Europe will launch a three-year action plan in Kyiv on Sept. 16 to support Ukraine’s European agenda for reform in the areas of human rights, the rule of law and democracy, the council said in a statement on Sept. 12.
Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Hryschenko will open the conference.
“The positive results of ambitious reforms will ultimately benefit the citizens of Ukraine, the country’s institutions, and society as a whole,” they said ahead of the opening.
The new plan will cost EUR 22 million to implement. It will focus on the reform of the judiciary, the fight against corruption and money laundering, freedom of expression, local democracy, free and fair elections and on strengthening social security.” – Interfax-Ukraine 12/09/11
This is not the first time that Europe has thrown money at these issues in Ukraine. Ever since I have been here it has been an on-going matter with almost no visible results. There is no point to judicial exchange programs as the judiciary know very well how it should work in an a-political environment just as the politicians know how it should work. An additional Euro 22 million will not change the fact that all concerned know how it should be compared to how it is.
Similar money was spent under the Yushenko/Tymoshenko leadership but it did not change anything and in fact PACE/Council of Europe officially wrote to Yushenko in 2007 and raised their concerns over his direct influences in the courts which he promptly ignored.
ECHR rulings simply mounted up unactioned.
Regardless of leadership past or present, control of the judiciary has been part of the levers of power. Regardless of the Euro millions already spent and seemingly to be spent again, nothing whatsoever has effectively changed.
How will this money be accounted for this time? What methods will be employed to change things that are different and obviously ineffective from last time? How will any benefits for the EU taxpayers or Ukrainian society be measured and just as importantly verified?
With a rather opaque, inconsistent and politically coerced judiciary, transparency over how the EU funds are spent and the results from it are quite obviously necessary if it is to be seen in anyway as a beneficial exercise by any party with a vested interest. Most notably the civil societies of both Ukraine and the EU.
What we have here is a continuance of an old policy with no mention of the strategies to be employed, how they are different from previously ineffective strategies (if they are different this time), or any detail on implementation that has an obvious impact on whether a policy is effective, ineffective or counterproductive.
All we have is a general idea as to when, no idea as to how, who is so general it is actually impossible to hold anyone specifically to account, broad scope as to the what, albeit we all know why.
When the core issues here are transparency and accountability, there seems to be a distinct lack of it in this announcement. That will be counterproductive in the eyes of the EU taxpayers (throwing more good money after bad in effect), ineffective in the eyes of the Ukrainian public (as they will not know what is supposed to change and whether any benchmarks are actually reached), and if it can be seen as effective at all, it can be framed as the continuing goodwill and sustained interest from a supra-structure to the Ukrainian leadership that historically has never trickled down to the populous by way of results.
Does anyone think this Euro 22 million will make a difference? If so, how will we ever know? A mutual backslapping statement in 3 years time to justify the costs when nobody has noticed any change is simply hollow!
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