The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union has received a document which shows that the President’s Administration is gathering information from around the entire country about socio-political and socio-economic processes in the regions. Such passports of the regions were to be created by 9 July 2010 and then updated on a quarterly basis.

You could on the one hand say that this is a natural process and that the government wants to know what is happening in the regions. However this more likely raises many questions regarding a far from democratic form of government, as well as the use of administrative resources by the Party of the Regions.

Some time ago, under Kuchma, in 2001 the Ukrainian State Centre of Social Services for Youth of the State Committee on Youth Policy, Sport and Tourism issued a Form for Social Passport of the Region and timeframe for gathering the information http://zakon.nau.ua/doc/?uid=1041.4516.0 There you were dealing with collection of ordinary information.

The passport in question, in addition to data previously included in that social passport, contains a lot of other data. This is for example information about all enterprises, institutions and organizations in the region. However the main thing is that information is collected about the heads of all enterprises, institutions and organizations in the region. Among other things such information includes:

– party affiliation (political orientation);

– who they supported at the 2010 presidential elections;

– public rating;

– possibility of cooperation.

We would stress that this information is collected about all heads of all bodies of power in the region, bodies of local self-government, police, prosecutor, courts, etc. It is also gathered about other managers and businesspeople in the region.

The same information is contained with regard to deputes of all levels and heads of cities and settlements.

Clearly the gathering of such information has nothing in common with democracy. This is effectively a database about all influential people in the country which in future will enable the Party of the Regions to form and implement its political strategy.

The gathering of information about a person is typical for the security services of totalitarian countries. It is extraordinary that the President’s Administration should have begun engaging in this.

According to legislation, the gathering of such information is prohibited without the person’s consent. Furthermore the authorities do not have legally designated power to collect such information.

At the beginning of July, human rights activists accused the President’s Administration. At the time, this was categorically denied: http://www.president.gov.ua/news/17366.html.

Then information about such information being gathered emerged in the West of the country, for example, in the Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions: http://www.wz.lviv.ua/pages.php?ac=arch&atid=84298. Then they claimed that this was "a local initiative" and centralized gathering of information was not taking place.

At the end of July Ukrainska Pravda reported the gathering of the same information in the Chernivtsi region: http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/07/26/5251041/

In our document, although it is also general, it was the Kyiv region that was in question (although it is possible that it was produced as an example).

We thus see that all is quite centralized since there cannot be an identical initiative in entirely different places. In each region the same document is emerging on the basis of which information is gathered. Will the President’s Administration continue to deny it?

The document can be seen here: files/docs/1283967509.pdf