Thursday, October 06, 2005

Serhiy Holovaty has been appointed minister of justice of Ukraine.

Just as with Yekhanurov, I remember a tiny little bit about Holovaty from his first term as justice minister (1995-1997). It's sort of untranslatable, though.

He once announced on TV, very seriously, that he was going to rename the ministry of justice into something that sounded very much like the Ministry of Truth: instead of Ministerstvo Yustytsii Ukraine would get Ministerstvo Spravedlyvosti.

(To me, both words - yustytsiya and spravedlyvist' - mean 'justice' in English, but I'm sure there's a way to somehow distinguish between the two. The former is a legal term, while the latter has, in this context, little but emotive connotation.)

Anyway, this is the only relevant thing I remember about Holovaty - and it is hard for me to take him too seriously because of that.

Last month, when they were voting for Yekhanurov as prime minister, Holovaty dissented from the rest of his faction, Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and voted for, not against, Yushchenko's candidate. I've really no idea what to make of him - but I do hope he won't act as notoriously silly as Roman Zvarych did.

1 comment:

  1. We've got "ministerstwo sprawiedliwo?ci" in Poland and it doesn't have much in common with Orwell's "1984", I may assure you ;) Sometimes I even wish it had, Ministry of Truth was veeeery efficient ;)

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