Name: Alyona Shkrum
Age: 28
Education: Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv; Sorbonne University (Paris, France) and Cambridge University (Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Profession: lawmaker with the Batkivshchyna parliamentary faction
Did you know? Alyona Shkrum speaks four languages and counts Winston Churchill as her role model. In her spare time, she likes to watch TV series related to law.
Alyona Shkrum, a 28-year-old member of parliament from the 19-member Batkivshchyna Party, is one of the youngest lawmakers in Ukraine’s parliament. However, she’s already achieved more than some of parliament’s veterans.
As a head of parliament’s civil service subcommittee, Shkrum has been leading the reform of the civil service, with the aim of cleaning up Ukraine’s cumbersome and corrupt state bureaucracy. Passing the law on civil service reform was a tedious battle, as parliament several times failed to gather the 226 votes needed for its approval. It finally came into force in May. For Shkrum, this was a great personal victory.
The law sets up an open competition process for government jobs, which is intended to prevent officials from handing out positions as rewards for political allies. Also, by the end of the year, each ministry is to appoint a state secretary. These officials will oversee the daily work of the ministries and ensure that work goes on even if the cabinet resigns.
Since 2014, Shkrum has submitted more than 110 draft laws that she authored or co-authored, including a law on the rights of internally displaced people.
She started her career studying law at Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko National University, and then went on to obtain a master’s in law from the Sorbonne. However, she was still hungry for more learning.
A fan of British culture, she set the goal of studying in the United Kingdom, and, at the third attempt, was accepted to study law at Cambridge University. She describes the old British university town as a “magical place.”
After returning to Ukraine, she joined a group of Western-educated Ukrainian activists, who launched the Professional Government Initiative in March 2014. In the run-up to the 2015 parliamentary election campaign, the group’s members were courted by a range of parties, and the Batkivshyna Party approached her.
Shkrum said she underwent a number of interviews before the party’s leaders decided to include her on their election list. It was not an easy choice to make, she told the Kyiv Post, as she had dreamed since childhood of becoming a diplomat.
Still, coming to work in parliament was not an entirely novel experience for the young lawmaker. Before starting her own political career, Shkrum worked as a lawyer for Iryna Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker who currently heads the European integration committee in parliament.
“So it wasn’t that unusual for me to come to parliament,” Shkrum said in an interview with the Kyiv Post, but she added that being a lawmaker is a “great emotional pressure.”
