Mr. Chairman, on behalf of our organization, Canadian Friends of Ukraine, I want to thank you for inviting us to take part in this hearing before your parliamentary committee.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the foreign affairs and international development committee.
Thank you also to our parliamentarians for the emergency debate on the issue of Ukraine that took place a few days ago. As you know, that fact was reported quite widely in Ukraine's media in advance of the debate and following. I think it's essential that Ukraine's readers, both on the Internet and in official newspapers, have access to that information, and we're very happy that Canada took such an immediate stance in Parliament to have that debate occur.
My name is Lisa Shymko. I am here representing the Canadian Friends of Ukraine in my capacity as chair of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Centre, which operates under the auspices of Canadian Friends of Ukraine.
I'd also like to acknowledge the presence of several of my colleagues from Canadian Friends of Ukraine, including our president, Margareta Shpir, and our director, Roman Waschuk. I thank them for being present today.
Canadian Friends of Ukraine is a non-profit, non-governmental organization established in 1990 to strengthen Canada-Ukraine relations by applying Canadian know-how to promote democracy and reform in Ukraine. Since its creation, Canadian Friends of Ukraine has taken the lead in fostering interparliamentary and intergovernmental cooperation between our two countries.
In 2000, Canadian Friends of Ukraine, in cooperation with CIDA, established the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Resource Centre at the National Parliamentary Library of Ukraine in Kiev. The state-of-the-art facility houses a collection comprising Canadian federal and provincial statutes. The centre strives to strengthen the process by which legislation is developed in Ukraine by improving access to information for parliamentarians, their staff, and the general public.
We're very proud of this centre. We feel that it's a showpiece for Canada. It has welcomed ambassadors from across the world, parliamentarians, and cabinet ministers. We've had several visitors, including not only visitors from western European states, but Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs as well.
Canadian Friends of Ukraine is also the founder of the international statesmen dinner, which provides a Canadian forum for political leaders from Ukraine. In 2003, we hosted the visit of the former Prime Minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, to Canada and facilitated her meetings here in Ottawa with the Speaker, who hosted a luncheon for her. She also held meetings with the then foreign affairs minister, Mr. Bill Graham, and she also made a representation in front of representatives of CIDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
She subsequently addressed a very large audience at the Royal York Hotel, which included senators and ministers, parliamentarians from all parties, and media luminaries such as Peter Mansbridge and others. In her address, the audience heard Ms.Tymoshenko deliver an impassioned speech on the need to fight government corruption in a post-soviet Ukraine. It is ironic, as everyone before me has mentioned here, that eight years later Ms. Tymoshenko is now the subject of what Khrushchev's great-granddaughter recently called a modern-day Stalinist show trial.
A year ago, I and my colleague, the president of Canadian Friends of Ukraine, Margareta Shpir, had the honour of accompanying the Prime Minister on his historic trip to Ukraine, during which the Prime Minister so eloquently enunciated the democratic principles on which Canada's foreign policy is founded. We definitely never imagined, at least on the part of our NGO, that 10 months later my colleague and I would be sitting in a courtroom observing the trial of Ms. Tymoshenko. We did have an opportunity to speak to her briefly and she did want to thank Canada for monitoring the trial so diligently.
As you know, and as has been said prior to my addressing you today, the trial and the persecution of other officials have directly impacted the road map of priorities for Canada-Ukraine relations that was signed by the foreign ministers of Canada and Ukraine in 2009. Many of my comments are part of a 14-page brief that we have prepared for the members of the committee, which we hope to distribute to you later.
The emerging situation in Ukraine and its neighbouring country, Russia, have of course raised serious concerns not only about the future of Ukrainian democracy and political sovereignty, which if left unaddressed will have strategic geopolitical implications not only for Ukraine but for the entire region, but as the previous speaker alluded to, there are several troubling aspects to that erosion.
First is the persecution of opposition leaders and the selective justice. I won't repeat what you already know about Tymoshenko and other members of the former government, but I do want to indicate that in the area of impartiality, on the part of judicial proceedings Amnesty International has reported that only 0.2%--that's two in 1,000--of those indicted by the prosecution in Ukraine are found not guilty and set free. The average in the EU is over 40%.
I'd also like to draw attention to the fact that there are troubling violations of human rights and media freedom in Ukraine. In April of 2010, Ukraine's president abolished the national commission on freedom of speech and the rule of law, and that has been one of the questions from one of members of Parliament in terms of media freedom.
We are deeply concerned that there is a problem in terms of how the line between the state and media independence has been blurred. There is a media tycoon, for example, by the name of Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, who owns a pro-government TV channel known as Inter, and he was appointed head of the Security Service of Ukraine--a major conflict of interest. Now what we see is that the Security Service of Ukraine very often pressures the national television and radio broadcasting council and threatens to cut off their broadcasting licences if their television station interviews one too many opposition leaders.
It has also been mentioned today that Reporters without Borders has published a press freedom index and that has indicated a major deterioration in press freedom in Ukraine. Ukraine's ranking has fallen to 131st place, which is a sharp drop from its previous year's ranking of 89th place. To put this in perspective, Russia's rank remains notably worse, at 140th.
There are also many other issues that I'm not going to discuss today but are alluded to and discussed in detail in our brief in regard to an endemic police criminality. That is a big problem in Ukraine. There are countless cases of individuals who either have died in police custody or have been beaten by police officers and have not had follow-up investigations. Those cases are indicated in our brief.
There are, of course, other abuses of parliamentary democracy and the constitution, and a strong attack on national identity. These are also enunciated in our brief.
I'd also like to make reference to another issue that one of your members of Parliament asked about today, and that is what we call “the Russia factor”. Russia has very specific political and economic objectives in Ukraine, and this is not surprising. We do believe that the current political crisis in Ukraine, coupled with Russia's ambition for greater influence in that part of the world, may herald some troubling geopolitical shifts. I'd like to draw attention to a few aspects.
First, as you know, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is aggressively pushing for Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company to take over Ukraine's state energy company, Naftogaz, whose pipeline transports 80% of the natural gas used by the European Union countries. One of the commentators in the National Review, George Weigel, recently wrote that if this does happen, it is going to have profound implications for European energy security and for Russia's capacity to impose its will on Europe in the energy sector.
A second factor on the perspective of Russian influence is the fact that, as you know, Moscow is pursuing the creation of a Russian-led common market, customs union, and possible common currency. This would not only compromise Ukraine's sovereignty, but would also see Ukraine abandoning negotiations with the EU on association in a rather wide-encompassing trade agreement.
The other issue is the troubling record of the decline of human rights in Russia, which we believe is having a spillover effect into Ukraine. According to the committee for the protection of journalists, 22 journalists and media personnel were killed in Russia between 2000 and 2010, and there have been multiple attacks on human rights activists, lawyers, and others. I won't read you all the examples.
I don't know how much time I have left, but I'm getting to my conclusion.
We do believe that the road map is at risk. We do believe that the loss of Ukraine as a strategic partner of Canada and the EU would have far-reaching global consequences, but we also believe that a business-as-usual approach is not going to be adequate at this time. We talk about constructive engagement. We'd prefer to call it conditional engagement, and we have 14 proposals and recommendations to the department and to Parliament. I am just going to read the first essential ones and then leave you in peace.
Our first recommendation is that no invitations be extended to high-ranking Ukrainian government officials, particularly the President of Ukraine, for participation in official or state visits to Canada at this time.
Second is that further negotiations aimed at signing a free trade agreement between Canada and Ukraine be suspended until after the 2012 parliamentary elections in Ukraine, conditional on the participation of Ukraine's parliamentary opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, in those elections.
Third, we believe that attempts to bar the opposition leader from participating in those elections should be considered as grounds for completely withdrawing from that process.
We also believe that Canada should take advantage of its participation at the upcoming G-20 Summit in Cannes to encourage world leaders, particularly those in the U.S. and Europe, as part of important leverage, to make future economic integration between Ukraine and EU countries conditional on the achievement of an impartial Ukrainian judicial system and open parliamentary elections. At the same time, we believe they should insist that Russia refrain from interfering in Ukraine's internal affairs.
We have many more recommendations, but I do want to say, since you spoke about NGOs, that it is important that you continue to engage with NGOs. We believe that the Canadian government, CIDA, and other bilateral channels should work more closely with Canadian NGOs that have a strong record of successfully implementing programs in Ukraine. We include our NGO in that group. We're very happy and pleased about our track record.
I thank you for the time.