Maidan

The Holodomor Commemoration Ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on November 30, 2010 formed the backdrop for a day of consultations with Ministers and Members of Parliament.

We appeal to you for public support for the position of the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” in our stand against the self-isolation of Ukrainian universities, and against the further degradation of research and education in Ukraine.

For the last few years in the pre-Yanukovich period of Ukraine’s history, the Holodomor has become a vibrant, albeit sometimes controversial subject at the United Nations in New York . Ukraine’s Permanent Mission at the UN with such Ukrainian community organizations as the Ukrainian World Congress, the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America over the years have conducted commemorative programs, issued statements, initiated the collection of signatures on Statements of member-states, all regarding the Holodomor.

Questions are rightly asked about the use of the police under Minister Mohylyov in suppressing peaceful protest and obstructing protesters from reaching Kyiv. This ministerial appointment was incredible from the outset.. The President’s Administration which expends enormous effort (and unspecified amounts of money) on trying to improve its reputation would do well to understand that the most expensive image-makers cannot achieve the impossible. Virulent hate speech against an entire ethnic minority cannot be glossed over, nor explained away as the Minister’s “personal views”

The Political Assembly of the European People's Party (EPP) has approved today, unanimously, a resolution that condemns the undemocratic conduct of the recent local elections in Ukraine and the regrettable alliance of the European Socialists with the governing Party of Regions

While even access to information about Ukraine’s murkiest elections in 5 years was carefully doctored in Ukraine, several Members of the European Parliament in Brussels were fed a quite different line - literally

A government which conceals information about its expenditure and activities; which doctors laws and uses enforcement and regulatory bodies, the courts, etc, to serve its own ends, will not balk at using similar methods against foreign investors

Taras Shevchenko, Director of the Media Law Institute has provided this daming legal analysis of the draft Law “On amendments to some legal acts on ensuring access to public information put forward by two Party of the Regions National Deputies

Ominous comments by Olena Bondarenko, Party of the Regions National Deputy and spokesperson on issues of press freedom regarding western donor organizations, the enemy within supposedly funded from abroad, are seriously disturbing and require swift clarification

Those who compare developments in Ukraine to 1937, the worst year of the Terror, obscure the real dangers. What is happening - and what is muffled – bears much more in common with the Brezhnev days, while the situation is made critical by similar processes to those which have already left Russia a democracy in name alone.