Ukraine’s parliament on Nov. 10 failed in its second attempt to approve anti-discrimination legislation required by the European Union under the Ukraine-EU Visa Liberalization Action Plan.
Co-authored
by several
lawmakers, the draft amendment to the Soviet-era Labor Code went
through six votes in 13 minutes to get included on
the
agenda.
Arguing
in favor of the law, Yuriy Lutsenko, a member of the president’s
faction in parliament, made it clear that the draft law would be
limited to the workplace.
“This
will not legalize same sex marriage – nobody is proposing that here.
But not allowing these people a place in the labor market is against
the laws of God,” Lutsenko said in parliament on Nov. 10.
Mykola
Knyazhitsky, a People’s Front lawmaker, argued for the bill by
referencing Polish legislation similar to the proposed draft, noting
that even “traditional Catholic, Polish society” had
anti-discrimination norms.
Earlier
on Nov. 10, President Petro Poroshenko had urged the parliament to
adopt the law, arguing against any kind of discrimination.
The
law was tried twice in parliament, receiving 207 of the required 226
votes in the 423-seat
parliament. A Nov. 5 attempt to adopt a similar norm received a mere
117 votes.
Some
lawmakers did not vote for the Nov. 10 law because they said it
hadn’t passed proper parliamentary procedure, under which it should
have been presented ahead of time. The draft was dated November 10.
Earlier,
Olena Sotnyk, a Samopomich Party
lawmaker, told the Kyiv Post that her faction was boycotting
legislative initiatives that were presented in breach of procedure.
Eight
of the 16 Samopomich lawmakers present supported the bill, while the
other eight
abstained.
The
proposed legislation would forbid “all kinds of discrimination in
the workplace – direct or indirect (…) on the grounds of race, skin
color, political, religious and other beliefs, sex, gender identity,
sexual orientation, ethnical background, etc.”
Kyiv
Post staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at
[email protected]
