On Tuesday, November 5, the 8th Ukrainian Women’s Congress took place in Kyiv. It is the annual public platform for gender policy-making. This year, the Congress took place under the slogan “Women’s Potential: New Roles, New Quality.”
The discussion “Politics Without Women is a Threat to Democracy” included the Chair of the Board of the Civil Network OPORA, Olga Aivazovska. She believes that Ukraine’s key challenge is to clearly establish where we are and where we aspire to be as a state.
Aivazovska believes that the post-war period will be tough because the country will be poor, and the society will be exhausted and asking for simple solutions to complicated issues. That is why there will be a huge problem that we might regress to the old practices, such as voter bribery.
“If Ukraine is fighting for the democratic agenda, we are bound to exercise, create, and protect the forms of exercising the political rights of citizens, among other things,” Olga Aivazovska believes. Ukraine is a democracy, and we are fighting for it. We are supported in this by a civilized democratic world. We shall not step back from rights and freedoms exercised in Ukrainian political space for decades,” says Aivazovska. If the people are certain that we must proceed to the European Union, where even non-citizens can vote in local elections, could we pose obstacles to participation in the political process as candidates or voters for Ukrainian people staying out of the country? Democracy is an ideology; human rights are its element. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about political rights and the right to life. If we take the government-level decision about Ukraine’s recovery and the new electoral cycles but still claim, as a side note, that “here, we would avoid the previous practices; here, women cannot participate in elections,” wouldn’t that cause the divide?” – asks Olga Aivazovska.
However, Aivazovska added that the Civil Network OPORA conducted a large survey on polarization in Ukraine: «Presently, Ukrainian society is not polarized, but it will be unless each and everyone contributes to the public policy-making, unless we can participate in the process through electing legitimate representatives that would drive these reforms in the future and assume responsibility for their implementation,” believes the expert.
You can watch the video recording of the discussion on the YouTube channel of the UWC: https://youtu.be/AbYlSVEcEFU