Amid growing impatience with Ukraine’s political leaders, the nation’s lawmakers return from a two-month summer break to a packed agenda.
During the current session, which will last until January, parliament wants to adopt key anti-corruption bills, work on decentralization, enact a transparent land market and approve the budget for 2017.
Moreover, lawmakers still have unfinished business left over from the previous session – appointing new members of the Central Election Commission, improving electoral legislation, and passing a bill that would regulate Ukraine’s Hr 30 billion ($1.2 billion) energy market.
But while lawmakers seem to understand the public’s demands for change, political bickering and populism, as seen in previous sessions, still threaten to get in the way of progress on reform. Speaking to the Kyiv Post on the Rada’s opening day, independent lawmaker Hanna Hopko said she hoped lawmakers would be able to put their political differences behind them.
“The most important thing is to work together to get results,” Hopko said. “That’s something we’ve not seen yet. It’s got to begin now.”
The Rada has made a reasonably good start this session – over the first three days lawmakers voted for the arrest of an allegedly corrupt judge, approved legislation to relocate higher education institutions from the occupied territories in the Donbas, and passed several bills on the rights of convicts.
The most anticipated legislation of the first week’s agenda was the decentralization package of laws. The parliament was scheduled to vote on it on Sept. 8, but postponed most of the bills in the package.
According to Vadym Miskyi, head of advocacy department at Reanimation Package of Reforms, a civil activism group, these laws will allow towns and villages to set up more than 100 so-called amalgamated communities for self-administration by the end of the year.
But parliament also has a lot more on its to-do list.
Anti-corruption laws
Civil activists have for months been calling on parliament to pass a law to launch an independent anti-corruption court, which would hear the cases of officials accused of corruption.
This court is mentioned in judicial reform legislation approved in June. However, that legislation didn’t stipulate how and, more importantly, when the court has to be set up.
“That means there’s no deadline, and (lawmakers) can talk about it and forget it, or just pretend for a long time that they’re doing something,” Miskyi said.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, experts from the Reanimation Package of Reforms and reform-oriented lawmakers are now drawing up a draft law to create the court. According to the bill’s authors, they want to table the legislation in parliament “in the nearest future.”
“We can’t wait for the (regular) courts to be reformed – it will take too much time,” Miskyi said, explaining while such a special court is needed.
But Yegor Sobolev, a lawmaker with the Samopomich faction, said this law, as well as other anti-corruption legislation, would only be adopted if there were strong support from the public, media, and the international community.
Another bill that parliament has to approve would allow the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to tap phones by itself – without having to use the equipment of Ukraine’s SBU security service.
“Now (the SBU’s) involvement renders corrupt people inside the security service untouchable,” Sobolev said. “The bureau should be able to get to anyone.”
Miskyi said the approval of phone tapping powers for the bureau was “a matter of one vote,” and said he hoped lawmakers would pass the law by the end of September.
Energy market regulator
The issue of energy is one where populism might get in the way of reform: The opposition, in a bid to win favor with voters, is demanding the cancellation of the unpopular law passed last session that increased gas and electricity rates to market levels.
Serhiy Rybalka, a lawmaker from Oleg Lyashko’s Radical Party, told the Kyiv Post that the current utility rates would result in “a genocide of the Ukrainian people.”
“We want to make the government explain these gas prices,” Rybalka said.
Yuliya Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna faction is also hoping to use the rise in utility rates as a stick with which to beat the current government. Oleksiy Ryabchyn, a lawmaker with Btakivshchyna, told the Kyiv Post that “the utility prices are eating into the people’s savings.”
Miskyi criticized lawmakers for making a big issue about utility rates, while not acting to improve the energy market in general.
“(Lawmakers) can’t seem to find the time to vote for a mechanism that would make the market regulator transparent and open,” he said.
The regulator in question is the National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public Utilities. It was established by presidential decree, and currently it’s up to the president to appoint its administrators – effectively putting the commission under the president’s full control.
To counter that, the expert community has proposed legislation that would allow the transparent hiring of commission members and make the setting of energy tariffs more transparent. However, the bill has failed to pass several times, the last attempt being on July 14.
“We will try to find new reasons for the lawmakers to vote for it,” Miskyi said, adding that the main reason would be an economic one – passing of the bill is one of the European Union’s conditions for further financial support to Ukraine.
Budget deadline
Hopko said she hopes this year the government will table the draft budget in parliament earlier than usual, and that lawmakers won’t be scrambling to approve the document right before the New Year, as has commonly been the case in previous years. Last year the government presented the draft of the budget in December, and the Verkhovna Rada passed it only on Dec. 25, 2015.
According to Miskyi, the most crucial element of next year’s budget is that there is appropriate financing for newly established anti-corruption bodies like the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the National Police, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Office and the State Investigation Bureau.
Protecting reforms
Besides passing new legislation, lawmakers will have to protect positive changes that have already been made, Miskyi said.
One such change is the electronic declaration system for public officials. After surviving several attempts of legislative sabotage, the system was finally launched on Sept. 1, albeit in a barely-functioning form.
“Unfortunately, we’re hearing comments from the president and the justice minister that the e-declarations legislation is flawed, and this could lead to attempts to restrict the information that has to be declared, or cut the public’s access to this information,” Miskyi said.
Tetiana Donets, a lawmaker with the People’s Front faction, has already registered a draft law that, if passed, would hobble the entire e-declaration system.
Miskyi says that experts and activists have to put pressure on lawmakers to focus on what is really important, rather than on their own interests.
“Parliament is a huge (producer) of legislative spam. They have to decrease the quantity and improve quality (of bills),” he said.
