Late at night on Aug. 29, 363 Ukrainian lawmakers voted to cancel parliamentary immunity from prosecution.
With this vote, the new parliament came close to completing the campaign promise of nearly every parliamentary and presidential candidate Ukraine has seen: to strip lawmakers of one of the most attractive privileges they enjoy.
However, since the law requires amending Ukraine’s constitution, another vote is needed to pass it. It will require a 300-vote constitutional majority and that vote must take place during the next parliamentary session, which will start on Sept. 3.
The bill on lifting immunity became the first draft law that the new parliament, dominated by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, passed on its first day, after it was done with key appointments.
The bill was submitted to parliament in 2018, during the previous convocation, but wasn’t put forward for a vote.
Lifting parliamentary immunity became a campaign promise of Servant of the People, which received a 254-seat majority in the July 21 snap parliamentary election.
The law itself, if supported by a constitutional majority, will allow lawmakers to be prosecuted without the approval of the majority of parliament. A number of lawmakers from previous convocations were saved from prosecution because of lawmaker’s immunity.
Recently, in November, parliament refused to lift the immunity of lawmaker Stanyslav Berezkin, who was accused of misappropriating a $20-million loan from state-owned Oschadbank.
In another case in January, the Prosecutor General’s Office did not support lifting the parliamentary immunity of pro-government lawmaker Yaroslav Dubnevych, who was accused of embezzlement, arguing that some aspects of the motion contradict parliament’s regulations and some of the claims against him had not been confirmed.
Read More: How lawmakers passed Ukraine’s post-independence Constitution in 1996 and gave themselves immunity
