The Ukrainian NGO leaders and independent experts prepared a statement concerning Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU
ASSOCIATION AGREEMENT BETWEEN UKRAINE AND THE EU
TO BE INITIALED
Statement of the Civil Society of Ukraine
Herman Van Rompuy
President of the European Council
Jose Manuel Barroso
President of the European Сommission
Jerzy Buzek
President of the European Parliament
Catherine Ashton
High Representative to the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
Radoslaw Sikorski
President of the Council of the European Union, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
Viktor Yanukovych
President of Ukraine
Volodymyr Lytvyn
Speaker of the Parliament of Ukraine
Mykola Azarov
Prime Minister of Ukraine
Pawel Kowal
Chairman of the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, the European Parliament
Pawel Zalewski
Member of the European Parliament
Kostyantyn Gryshchenko
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine
José Manuel Pinto Teixeira
Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine
Ukrainian civil society organizations, the community of independent experts on European integration, and community networks, including the Ukrainian National Platform of the Civil Society Forum of the Eastern Partnership, welcome the conclusion of negotiations over the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU last week and call on Ukraine’s government and the European Union to put every possible effort into initialing the Association Agreement by the end of this year. Postponing the initialing of this Agreement beyond 2011 will have dangerous consequences for relations between Ukraine and the EU and Ukraine’s European integration, and—most importantly—will deprive ordinary Ukrainians of the sense of real European prospects. Such prospects provide Ukrainian citizens with an extremely important leverage for advocacy for their fundamental rights and freedoms and promoting democratic changes in Ukraine.
We appeal to the Ukrainian state authorities, first and foremost, the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, to:
– recognize and guarantee the commitments undertaken by Ukraine and EU demands with respect to ensuring the rule of law and independence of the judiciary; ensuring due conditions for functioning of an opposition, and providing a proper legislative and administrative frameworks for holding free and fair elections in Ukraine. These steps will be proof of Ukraine’s political will to abide by European values. We believe such steps will also help change the position of some European political forces, which nowadays insist that the Association Agreement must not be initialed under the current circumstances;
– refrain from insisting on unrealistic conditions, including from demanding the inclusion of a formal membership perspective on the part of the EU in the text of this Agreement, since the document by its nature is already a detailed outline of Ukraine’s European prospects.
We also appeal to the European Union to:
– initial the Association Agreement by the end of 2011, without blocking the process for political reasons, even though recognizing the challenges to democratic development of Ukraine;
– affirm, in the Preamble to the Association Agreement, that Ukraine is a European country with a European identity, as recognized in earlier bilateral documents;
– present a transparent list of conditions to the Government of Ukraine as a sine qua non for the Association Agreement to take effect. As representatives of civil society, we guarantee that this list will be disseminated broadly to the citizens of Ukraine;
– clearly state that the official signing and ratification of the Association Agreement will only be possible after Ukraine meets the list of conditions;
– demonstrate support for the striving of the Ukrainian society by initialing the Association Agreement to give the Ukrainian citizens a chance for European modernisation of their country.
We emphasize that the initialed Association Agreement and its published text will be an important tool for the Ukrainian civil society to generate public demand for (I would say) of reforms and influence the government to undertake the necessary changes.
We reiterate the importance of the Ukrainian civil society’s demands that were expressed in the statements issued by leading Ukrainian pro-European platforms on October 20 and September 12, 2011.
Therefore, we appeal to the President of Ukraine, as the Guarantor of the Constitution of Ukraine, to the Government and the Parliament of Ukraine, and to the European Union, with the demand that the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU be initialed.
The statement is here
