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Ukraine’s lustration law spells crackdown on political opponents

ZAMYATINA Tamara

Ukraine’s law On Cleansing the Authorities, effective as of Thursday, October 16, will serve as a tool in the hands of the Kiev authorities eager to crack down on political opponents

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. Ukraine’s law On Cleansing the Authorities, effective as of Thursday, October 16, will serve as a tool in the hands of the Kiev authorities eager to crack down on political opponents, polled experts have been telling TASS.

Under this legal act, also commonly referred to as lustration law, all those who held official positions during the Viktor Yanukovich presidency, will be dismissed from office. The same measure will apply to all former members of Soviet era authorities, except for those whose posts were elective ones.

As Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk said earlier, lustration may concern up to half a million people. Each of them will have to face a “lustration committee”. After the procedure the official will either be re-appointed or dismissed without the right to take any civil service jobs for a period five to ten years.

“The law on lustration was adopted in the run-up to the October 26 parliamentary election under pressures from Maidan demonstrators - the advocates of Ukraine’s euro-integration - who are demanding the removal from governing bodies of all those who are against - in the first place, the followers of Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions. In reality Ukraine’s current pseudo-elite is tightly linked with the previous authorities. The same is true of President Poroshenko, who under Yanukovich held the seat of economic development and trade minister,” a leading researcher at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, Eduard Popov, has told the TASS political analysis centre.

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