From: Barry Stoller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [pttp] Ukraine Court: Ban on Communists Illegal Reuters. 29 December 2001. Ukraine Court Says Ban on Communists Illegal. KIEV -- Ukraine's powerful communists won a historic victory on Saturday when a high court rejected as unconstitutional a blanket ban imposed on the Soviet-era communist party a decade ago. Communists were allowed to continue political activity in independent Ukraine despite parliament's ban in 1991 and now represent the largest group in the 450-seat assembly. But the revamped communist party had been pressing for full legalization. "Despite huge regret that we needed 10 years to come to this natural and evident truth, this is a great victory," Leonid Grach, a leader of the revamped Communists and a speaker of the Crimean parliament, was quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency as saying. The ban was imposed on the Ukrainian communist party in the aftermath of the failed 1991 hard-line coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But in its ruling on Saturday, the Ukrainian Constitutional Court rejected calls for communist assets to be returned to the party. It said in a statement that the new Communist party had no right to the vast amount of property amassed by the communists in the Soviet era which include scores of government buildings, rest homes and sanatoria. Nationalists, who played a key role in the process of securing independence for Ukraine, have repeatedly said that re-legalizing the Communist party was tantamount to pardoning decades of religious and cultural oppression from Moscow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
