On the early afternoon of July 15, Speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy
announced the Verkhovna Rada session to be over, sending 416 lawmakers on a
seven-week summer break. The next session will start on Sept. 6.
In their last week before the break, the lawmakers passed some progressive legislation, ratified Paris climate agreement, stripped more cities of their Communist names, and introduced the latest version of the biometric passport.
However, they failed to pass a number of much-anticipated bills. The parliament failed to renew the Central Election Commission on the eve of the parliamentary by-election and lacked votes for the long-awaited legislation that would establish an energy market regulator.
Latest votes
Ukrainian parliament voted on July 14 to ratify the Paris Agreement – the first-ever universal, legally binding global climate deal. The document that was adopted by 195 countries at the Paris Climate Conference in December sets out an action plan to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.
On the same day, lawmakers passed the changes to the legislature on the biometric passport – now, every Ukrainian will be getting one at 14. Also, the Ukrainian passports will not have the marriage and divorce stamps anymore.
Continuing the decommunization initiative, parliament changed the names ofsome villages and cities in Mykolayiv, Odesa, Kharkiv Oblasts, and renamed Kirovohrad, a city 300 kilometers south of Kyiv, to Kropyvnytskyi, after Marko Kropyvnytskyi, Ukrainian writer and theater actor.
Hlib Vyshlinsky, the executive director of the Center for Economic Strategy, told the Kyiv Post he was rather unhappy with the parliament’s work in their last week before the break, saying he didn’t see “a will to make an effort and actually work.” However, he noted that such low productivity is quite typical for the lawmakers’ work during the entire session.
Unfinished business
The parliament’s biggest failure within the last week, according to Vyshlinsky, was their inability to find enough votes to pass the bill that would regulate Ukraine’s Hr 30 billion energy market.
The bill that failed to pass several times on July 14 aims to decrease the president’s influence on the National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public Utilities, as well as make energy tariffs more transparent.
Vadym Miskyi, head of advocacy department at Reanimation Package of Reforms, also criticized lawmakers for this failure.
He said that it was convenient for both pro-presidential and opposition forces to leave things as they were. He pointed out that only a small percentage of President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, the biggest faction in parliament, voted for the energy regulation bill. The opposition did not vote for the bill at all, saying it is not radical enough, while in reality they want to be able to use the topic of the energy tariffs in further criticism of the government, he said.
“This is a very handy topic for further political mottos,” Miskyi said.
The only positive thing, Miskyi said, was that Parubiy sent the law for the repeated second reading instead of dropping it, meaning that the document will be put on vote again – but not until September.
Another shortcoming of the last week of the session, according to Miskyi,was that lawmakers did not pass the legislation to give autonomy to the hospitals that would have allowed them to improve their medical service and optimize financing. Neither did they implement a punishment for non-personal voting in parliament. They didn’t vote to ease the access to the public information as well.
The parliamentary by-elections that will take place in seven constituencies on July 17 will be overseen by the members of the Central Election Commission who had to be replaced. Their legal terms have ended, but they remain in the commission because the parliament failed to vote for the new members.
Miskyi complimented lawmakers for several positive moves of the past weeks, like the constitution amendments that are key to reforming the court system.
“But our expectations were higher than what we saw in reality,” he said.
Before closing the parliamentary session, Parubiy said he hoped that in case Russia’s aggression in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas escalates during summer, lawmakers will find the 150 votes needed to open the early session.
Kyiv Post staffwriter Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected].
