The West should start noticing and encouraging grassroots[1]-democracy in Ukraine:

The Kyiv City Council, ruling over 3 million inhabitants has adopted exceptionally protective measures for real estate transactions, like forbidding beneficial ownership.
They went as far as starting to fully inform their citizens on plenary meetings by televising their plenary meetings live.

Town Hall property sales are being carried out through transparent electronic auctions.
No “piano”[2] voting – the physical presence at the vote is checked and unjustified absence of a deputy is punished by law.

An anti-corruption hotline is created for citizens to anonymously inform the City Council about whistle blowers.

Enforcing financially the rule of law: a new generation of international Ukrainian lawyers step into the limelight

Ukraine has introduced a legal request in the sum of at least 100 billion Euros against Russia to the International Court of Justice against Russia, in the name of 18 Ukrainian Companies, which held assets in now, illegally seized by Russia, Crimean peninsula.

Indeed, this annexation violates not only international law, but at least 500 of prior-, bilateral and multilateral international agreements, including 1994 Budapest Declaration. And what is particularly interesting in the newest legal request of Ukraine in the International Court, is that even if the loser challenges the legal decision, the International Court of Justice in Hague has already allowed the Ukrainian Gas Company Naftogaz to seize any and all assets of Russia’s Gazprom in the Netherland and Switzerland, where the assets were invested and are “bankable”.

Unlawful annexation is a double crime – it makes the occupying power, Russia, not only responsible for the people of a foreign nation, in search of foreign assets and riches, but also for the protection of foreign assets invested in Crimea, which knowing how is used to be in the East before the Iron Wall fell, might soon, as if by magic, belong to Russia. So, in spite of ever larger “Trumpism”, the rule of law is evolving positively, if slower than expected.

 

~East-West

 

 

[1] The political processes which are driven by groups of ordinary citizens, as opposed to larger organizations or wealthy individuals with concentrated vested interests in particular policies.

[2] A button pusher (Ukrainian: кнопкодав, Knopkodav) is a term in Ukrainian politics and society related to a member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine who votes on a motion by using own identity card as well as ones belonging to other deputies. This voting is done either with or without the consent of the absent deputies. The phenomenon is a point of various political speculations usually raised by an opposition which was never able to implement an effective control over it and is used to justify its political impotency. Other names for this phenomenon are “vote in the dark”, “truant voting”, “multiple voting”, “vote for himself and for the other guy”, “piano voting”, “pianism”. The participants of “button pushing” are МРs – “button pushers” who vote alien card, as well as those that provide for voting card or duplicate card to “button pusher”. The “button pushing” is one of the manifestations of political corruption and the crisis of parliamentarism in Ukraine.