You're reading: Ukrainian parliament reinstates 2004 Constitution

The Ukrainian parliament has passed a law on the return to the Constitution of 2004. A total of 386 MPs voted for the relevant law on Friday, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reports. The document was passed under simplified procedure without any decision of the relevant committee and was passed in the first and the second reading in one voting.

It was supported by 140 MPs of the Regions Party, 89 MPs of the
Batkivschyna Party, 40 MPs of the UDAR Party, 32 of the Communist Party,
and 50 independent lawmakers.

During the Orange Revolution of Dec. 2004, then president Leonid
Kuchma, with support from the Socialist and Communist parties and then
prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, agreed to a repeat runoff presidential
election on condition that the legislature pass “political reform.”

Earlier, on Dec. 3, the Supreme Court had issued a ruling
stressing “the impossibility of determining the returns of the
presidential election due to mass-scale falsifications.”

To overcome the crisis and prevent an escalation of the
confrontation, parliament passed draft changes to the constitution and
to the law on presidential elections, which made the repeat presidential
runoff possible.

None of the deputies representing the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc voted for
the changes. Nor did Tymoshenko or Viktor Yuschenko personally, but the
entire Party of Regions group in the legislature did support them.

Kuchma signed the changes into law immediately after the vote.

The changes replaced the presidential-parliamentary with the
parliamentary-presidential form of government, a system where
ministerial appointments were the prerogative of parliament rather than
the president as under the 1996 constitution.

Candidates for the posts of prime minister, defense minister and
foreign minister were to be proposed by the president, and candidates
for all other portfolios by the prime minister.

All the seats in the legislature were to be filled through the
proportional representation system – under the 1996 constitution, half
the deputies were elected through party ticket polls and half in
single-mandate constituencies.

After Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election, 252 deputies,
most of them from the Party of Regions, disputed the legality of the
“political reform” with the Constitutional Court.

On September 30 that year, the Constitutional Court ruled that the
approval of the constitutional changes had involved a procedural offense
– some of them were put to the vote without being assessed by the
Constitutional Court.

The Constitutional Court thereafter repealed the 2004 constitution and in effect restored the 1996 constitution.

Later parliament voted to extend periods between parliamentary and local elections from five to four years.

Under the current constitution, the next presidential election was to
take place on the last Sunday of Mar. 2015. If the 2004 constitution
becomes law again, the election will have to be held in Oct. 2014.