By Anna Romandash
Three years after Ukraine’s revolution, that ousted its corrupt president and brought new government, the country is trying to implement some of its hardest reforms. After successful transformation of police patrol, a network of activists under the umbrella of Reanimation Package of Reforms promotes further improvements in the legal system and anti-corruption laws. The EU-supported initiative has united activists from 79 civil organizations and created 104 bills and laws that aim to tackle some of country’s most pressing issues. Orange has spoken with Ivan Omelyan, RPR’s regional coordinator, on initiative’s current work, challenges, and how activists can cooperate in developing democracy.
“Our main aim is turning the post-revolution energy into real changes by uniting civil organizations and creating expert decisions and reforms,” says Omelyan, “We saw that the government could hear us better after the revolution, and unlike other organizations, we suggested concrete solutions and used legal language when communicating with politicians”.
What are the priorities of your initiative?
There are seven, and the main one is reforming the legal system. The other one is the anti-corruption reform to strengthen new organizations that have to battle corruption in the country. It is very important also to reform law enforcement agencies; without changing them, the governments tend to remain totalitarian. We want to keep the current rhythm with decentralization reforms when small towns receive more authority instead of concentrating all the influence in the capital. We also work in the area of energy efficiency as well as on lawmaking initiatives and projects that aim to reform state services to make this work prestigious and attractive to talented youth as well as minimize corruption in the industry.
What does lobbying look like in Ukraine?
Imagine that you have an idea to build a recycling plant in your city, but you have no land, and will not likely have an effective cooperation with local authorities. On the other hand, there are civil activists, who really want your city to be clean, so you get to work with them to see the mechanisms you lack to make your idea work. You reach some solutions like the decisions of the City Council or the Parliament, or a law, or a bill. After the solution is ready, you can discuss it with authorities, and when you are not heard, you protest until they recognize the problem and your solution. After the discussion starts, the politics start, too, and we become political players in a way and try to persuade the deputies to agree on the decision. This is how we work until the decision is made. Then, the hardest part begins: the implementation. Here, we spend a lot of time to promote and explain the change to the people.
How does your initiative work?
From the civil sector, we collect the initiatives that can become solutions of the Cabinet Ministers or Parliament. We work on these solutions in the expert groups and discuss them with all stakeholders. After a full cycle of public politics, which includes long debates and agreements, we go to the Parliament or President’s Administration and do everything we can to reach the decision. Although authorities often want to divide civil organizations, we manage to work together, involving more than 350 experts and seven coalitions across the country.
What are your failures?
There are many, but they teach us how to work with whom. We see large back-ups on anti-corruption reforms; the bodies which were created to fight corruption are being blocked. 106 cases against corrupt officials in Ukraine are not being investigated because the court does not work as it should. There is a big “stop” button on law enforcement reform. We launched a very successful police patrol, but the detectives and upper management were not changed. Another issue is that society is not ready for many initiatives related to officials’ transparency. Still, we understand that it is a start, and the mistakes can be avoided in our future work.
How do you monitor your performance?
We audit our work financially, and we also monitor whether we reach our goals or not. Our targets are in the reforms’ road map, where we write down concrete laws we want to lobby, and we can compare our results with our plans over a certain period of time. We also report before the European Commission. Since our goals are public, every citizen can audit our performance.
What’s next?
We see our work as a big neuron network of civil organizations, which were active during the revolution and wanted changes; and now, it is like leading an ongoing revolution where we solve local or national problems by activating civil sector.
It gets harder to make changes at the moment because the energy from the revolution is fading, and the government is starting “quiet repressions” where everything becomes black and white. Few years ago, we could cooperate with anyone, but now, more and more officials do not want to work with us, and there are also authorities we do not want to work with because they try to make society more corrupt.
We see that the reanimation has to end, and we have to switch into the mode of constant fight. We cannot demand reforms through revolutions, but have to work and perfect the mechanism in order to become a force that pressures the officials.
