Ukraine’s Justice Minister Denys Maliuska will have been in charge of Ukraine’s international courts, penitentiary system, state registers, registration, executive service and other justice issues for exactly five years in late August 2024, BBC reports.
Political observers do not classify the head of the Ministry of Justice as belonging to any particular group of influence, and Denis Maliuska has managed to establish himself more as an extravagant official with a specific sense of humour than as a political intriguer.
In an interview with BBC Ukraine, however, he was forced to answer serious questions that worry the state. In particular, about the legitimacy of President Volodymyr Zelensky after 21 May, when his 5-year term of office expires.
When asked by BBC journalists about the issue of Zelensky’s legitimacy after 21 May, when his five-year term expires, Maliuska said:
No, he will not lose his legitimacy … The powers of the president continue until the next one is elected. But many norms of the Constitution are formulated in such a way that whoever wants to find something to pick on or build some conspiracy theory on, he will find it. So we should expect a lot of noise and outcry, especially based on the fact that the authors-draftsmen of the Constitution had little faith in the realism of a full-scale war involving Ukraine and therefore behaved rather clumsily with regard to the relevant norms that are spelled out in the Constitution.
Maliuska also added:
Not only in terms of term limits, there are many other things in the Constitution that relate to wartime – it is not formulated perfectly, to put it mildly. Which certainly gives rise to various “conspiracy theories”. One example is someone somewhere commiserating on social media, perhaps also something that is being fuelled by Russia – that, like, Ukraine hasn’t declared a state of war.
When asked about the possibility of appealing to the body that interprets the constitution – the Constitutional Court – to set the record straight on the legitimacy of the president, Maliuska commented:
Frankly speaking, this is definitely beyond my authority. I am not an entity that can appeal to the Constitutional Court. Moreover, it is probably too late to do it now, because just such an appeal means that there is a question and there are doubts, they are justified, and we need the whole authority of the Constitutional Court to resolve this situation.
The minister also said in the interview:
Considering the communication and security situation in the country – it would be a huge mistake to officially and publicly question the legitimacy of the president now, so I think there is no point in appealing to the Constitutional Court now. Once, somewhere – maybe it would be, but again – not at this stage.
The BBC also asked whether from 21 May all decrees, documents of the president will be absolutely valid. Denis Maliuska replied:
Unequivocally. No president has ever worked day in and day out as the Constitution defines it. This applies to the Parliament as well. There were discussions of constitutionalists, but, again, in the end, this norm about the term of office – it has never been directly applied. It’s only as a certain reference point to be interpreted and applied in conjunction with the norms that determine the date of elections.
According to Maliuska, there are many norms in the Constitution of Ukraine that would need to be changed and improved, because there are a lot of holes there, and the text of the Constitution has never been worked on to remove legal imperfections.
It has always been a political process, a bargaining process. Something was deliberately left unsettled because there was no political agreement. Somewhere there were some ambiguities, somewhere there were some political slogans, like “land is the property of the Ukrainian people” – what it means, no one can understand, the minister said.
