This Court Ordered the Third Round That Saved Ukraine's Election

Klov Palace sits on a slope above Ivan Mazepa Street, a low yellow eighteenth-century mansion built for high tsarist officials. In late 2004 it housed the Supreme Court of Ukraine. Outside, on a freezing December morning, a crowd in orange scarves waited for a decision that no one in the courtroom had ever been asked to make. The November 21, 2004 presidential runoff between Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-European reformer, and Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-favored prime minister, had produced results international observers called fraudulent. Turnout in Yanukovych's Donetsk stronghold ran higher than 96 percent; whole polling stations produced improbable numbers. Yushchenko himself had survived a dioxin poisoning in September that pitted his face and nearly killed him. The Central Election Commission declared Yanukovych the winner on November 23. Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti filled that night with hundreds of thousands of protesters who did not go home. A tent city stretched down Khreshchatyk in the cold. Yushchenko's team took the case to the Supreme Court. Sixteen justices, led by Chief Justice Vasyl Malyarenko, heard six days of testimony. On December 3, 2004, the court delivered a unanimous ruling: the runoff was invalid due to systemic fraud, and a third round would be held on December 26 under enhanced international observation. It was the first time a former Soviet court had annulled a national election and ordered a rerun on the strength of civic protest and legal argument alone. On December 26, Yushchenko won 52 percent to Yanukovych's 44. The Orange Revolution did not deliver a smooth decade; Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko fell out, Yanukovych returned as president in 2010, and the country would fight another revolution on the same Maidan in 2014. But December 3 established a precedent Ukraine drew on twice more: that the vote counts, that a court can defend it, and that a crowd on the square can force both institutions to do their jobs. Klov Palace is now home to a division of the reorganized Supreme Court. The corridor where the sixteen justices deliberated is unmarked. The date is remembered anyway.