For those of you interested, the BBC’s website has an English translation of several parts of the Ukrainian Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday. I’m not a legal expert – especially on Ukrainian law – but I was struck by one aspect of the case that we either didn’t notice, or didn’t deem important enough to acknowledge during all the other events of the past twelve days, namely that Yuschenko’s lawyers concentrated their appeal solely on the runoff election, rather than the election as a whole. This meant that the Supreme Court was only given the choice of deciding the question of whether the election on November 21st was invalid, rather than the entire electoral process. The Court could only rule on the issue before it, and while Yanukovich’s team would have preferred the whole election to be rerun (assuming they weren’t going to get the election approved by the Court) they couldn’t argue for that without asking for even more evidence of voter fraud in the first round to be introduced.
There’s a question of whether this strategy emerged by accident or design, but it enabled them to get the result they wanted – a rerun against Yanukovich – rather than the idea that seemed to be gaining strength amongst Kuchma and the government in recent days – an entirely new election, with the opportunity for them to choose a new candidate to oppose Yuschenko while also being able to delay the election process for two or three months. Of course, my lack of legal knowledge could be completely off-base here, so I’d welcome comments from readers more knowledgeable on these matters.
And one final note of explanation for our readers who may find references to a ‘Boxing Day election’ in the British press confusing – it doesn’t mean that the runoff will be settled by the Queensberry rules, merely that Boxing Day is the name used in Britain and other countries for the 26th December.
The opposition’s legal strategy and its success was certainly by design. They only focused on the second round in their case and only wanted that round invalidated. No sense in arguing to restart the race from scratch when you’d already cleared the first hurdle.
Not that it will get any media but an interesting runoff is going on in Romania as well. PINR as a woderful article, ”Romania: Europe’s New ‘Sick Man”’
Re-run of whole election is suicidal to Yuschenko, simply because according to Ukrainian consitution, both he and Yanukovich are barred from participating in it.
Dec.26th as Boxing Day in Britain. This use to have me really puzzled. Why did the British have two days for Christmas and why did they call the second day Boxing Day?(I also could only think of prize fights!) Even after finding out Dec.26th was for gift giving, I could not figure out why the British did not call it gift day. It was only when somebody explained that Boxing Day came from putting gifts in BOXES and wrapping them up. I signaled my enlightment with a loud Homer Simpson DUH!
I do think the British and other countries who have two days for Christmas celebrations, the 25th for Jesus’ birth and the 26th for gift giving have it right and are more respectful of the religious part of Christmas then we in the US who try to cram everything into one day and trample over the celebration of Jesus’ birth.