Starting on Aug. 31, with a special session of Ukraine's parliament, the nation's lawmakers will tackle crucial issues, including constitutional changes, civil service reform and the 2016 budget.
The lawmakers will have an extra incentive to speed up progress for an impatient public: Local elections are taking place on Oct. 25, and voters could well take out their anger for the slow pace of reform on candidates who are tied to current leaders.
Constitution
The parliament’s priority in
the autumn session will be to overhaul the constitution in three core
areas: human rights, the judiciary and decentralization, according to
Viktor Musiyaka, the deputy head of the Constitutional Commission,
the body that recommends and draws up amendments to the Ukrainian
Constitution.
Parliament
on Aug. 31 will
vote on constitutional changes giving
more power and functions to local authorities and communities, byut
political leaders have said that – while decentralization will take
place – the Russian-occupied parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts
will not get special status. President Petro Poroshenko reiterated
his opposition to federalization or special legal status for the
separatist enclaves, which Moscow is insisting on but which has
little political support in Ukraine.
The
changes
were approved by Ukraine’s
Constitutional Court on July 31.
To change the constitution,
300 votes
in the 450-seat parliament are needed, rather
than the simple majority of 226 votes.
With members
of parliament from
coalition parties Samopomich and the Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko
threatening to vote against the pro-presidential coalition grouping
in parliament, it’s by no means certain the controversial changes
to Ukraine’s constitution will get through parliament.
Decentralization
is, nonetheless,
strongly supported by
Ukraine’s
international donors and the Ukrainian public and parties that try to
derail the process might be running some political risks.
Andy Hunder, the president
of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Post he
believes decentralization
is “a positive move
forward in the implementation of the provisions of the EU-Ukraine
Association Agreement, as well as encouraging change in local
government and the distribution of budget money in the regions.”
Moreover, 67 percent of
Ukrainians think their local authorities are ready for additional
powers and responsibilities, according to a nationwide poll conducted
on July 16-30 by the International Republican Institute.
However, Musiyaka is uncertain
about the outcome of the vote on the decentralization, as too many of
the proposed changes run counter to the recommendations of experts.
“The only thing we can do
now is learn from past mistakes and bring a broader range of experts
into the discussion about human rights and judicial changes,”
Musiyaka told the Kyiv Post.
While decentralization seems
to be inevitable, there is no unanimous vision of what changes are
required in the judicial sphere, according to Andriy Andrushkiv from
post Euro-Maidan civic watchdog Reanimation Package of Reforms.
While civic experts insist on
the dismissal of the entire judiciary
and the re-appointment
of new judges, the bill prepared by the Constitutional Commission
proposes to carry out checks on the current crop of judges, and
rehire those who pass the checks.
Similarly, it retains the
current four tier judicial system and presidential powers to appoint
and dismiss judges.
In an interview with Ukrainian
news magazine Novoe Vremya on Aug. 18, deputy head of the
Presidential Administration Oleksiy Filatov defended the commission’s
proposals. He compared the more drastic measures proposed by the
Reanimation Package of Reforms to “treating a headache with
guillotine.”
The Presidential
Administration expects the Constitutional Commission to finalize the
judicial reform proposals by the end of August, Filatov, told Novoe
Vremya.
Civil service reform
The rebooting of Ukraine’s
bloated and
bureaucratic civil
service remains the main stumbling block in the way of reforming
Ukraine’s main institutions of government.
The civil service has 340,000
employees, who generally have safe jobs until they reach retirement
age, after which they qualify for generous (by Ukrainian standards)
pensions. The tangled bureaucracy has about 70 central executive
bodies that often have overlapping functions.
“There’s almost no project
management or commitment to results, with a few rare exceptions –
that’s the civil service in Ukraine,” Andrushkiv said.
A civil service reform bill
that aimed to address these problems and to depoliticize the service
was passed by parliament at first reading on April 23, but it has
since run out of steam and is yet to go forward for second reading.
Nevertheless, Andrushkiv says
civil service reform should be parliament’s top priority. “And
it’s time for the Cabinet of Ministers to finally take the floor.
What is missing … is a clear position from the executive branch
saying: ‘We need reform,’” Andrushkiv said.
And with
a new budget year fast approaching, the risk that a new civil service
system will not be up and running by 2016 grows every day, admitted
Kostyantyn Vashchenko, head of the Ukraine’s National Agency on the
Civil Service.
The
state budget
The
Ukrainian government’s record on presenting budget legislation on
time is patchy. In recent years, the budget was passed at the last
moment. There’s not much to work with. If Ukraine’s gross domestic
product dips to $75 billion this year, even public sector spending of
35 percent would amount to only $24.5 billion.
The
business community in Ukraine expects parliament to pass tax changes
that
will “simplify the rules of tax administration and ensure there is
clear, transparent and predictable taxation,” Hunder said.
Andrushkiv
said
new
legislation aims to shrink the shadow economy and crack down on tax
evasion, without putting more pressure on small- and mid-sized
businesses at the same time.
To open
up public procurement to
Ukrainian companies, parliament also needs to adopt a law
that
switches the purchase system into an electronic format. Ukraine
has lost much of its public spending to corruption.
One
other important task facing the parliament that will have a direct
impact on government finances is approval of Ukraine’s recently
announced debt restructuring deal. The deal, announced on Aug. 27,
gives
about a 20
percent
haircut on Ukraine’s stock of sovereign and sovereign guaranteed
debt, bringing about
$3.6 billion in
debt relief, Ukraine’s
Finance Ministry said.
The ministry said the cabinet
would approve legislation on the deal and submit it to parliament on
its opening day on September 1. After parliament approves the bill,
the cabinet will pass a resolution on launching the restructuring on
Sept. 14, which will come into effect next day.
The military conflict in the Donbas, corruption and
unemployment remain top of the Ukrainian public’s main concerns, according to an
International Republican Institute poll released on Ukrainian Independence Day
on Aug. 24.
Despite growing dissatisfaction at the lack of
progress on reform (about 72 percent of 1,200 respondents think the country’s
headed in the wrong direction), support for change in the country remains
strong.
The nationwide poll was carried out on July 16-30. It
has a margin of error not exceeding 2.8 percent.
Source: IRI
Kyiv
Post’s legal affairs reporter Mariana Antonovych can be reached at
[email protected]
