Yesterday, 26th January 2015 deputy to Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Andriy Levus together with two other deputies registered initiative to implement changes to the law “On the purification of government”.
Proposed changes foresee bigger competences of the President of Ukraine. They give him power to leave all higher rank officers of the Military Forces of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Defence. In fact this takes responsibility off them and gives room to avoid lustration.
We declare that it is crucially important to find a mechanism of effective amnesty due to which distuingished citizens and those who are important for the state (especially at times of war) can be returned to their posts. Media often call for returning general Gennadiy Vorobiov who was in charge of ATO in september-october 2014.
Experts of the Open Dialog Foundation agree that to secure stable leadership of the ATO there is a need to implement well-designed mechanism of the lustration amnesty supervised by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
We ask deputies of Ukraine to withhold from voting for the proposed changes. Soon the working group at the Ministry of Justice will initiate its propositions regarding amnesty which will not be supervised by the President but by the Parliament.