Laws have the power to free and oppress, to advance societies or hold them back. Ukraine has adopted several laws in the last year that lawyers and public policy experts say have solidified Ukraine’s independence and democratic march.
Language law
On July 16, Ukraine’s controversial language law came into force. The overwhelming majority of the parliament — 278 out of 348 participating lawmakers — voted for the law.
The parliament passed the law despite appeals from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, NATO and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe to wait until this year’s election cycle is over.
The language law aims to expand the usage of the Ukrainian language in the media, education, and business and to establish a state apparatus to oversee the development of the language and language relations.
Viktor Taran, director of the Eidos policy research center, says the law is important “because the language issue has not been regulated in Ukraine since the time of (the declaration of) independence, and the only effective law dated back to the times of the Soviet Union.”
Taran believes that the new language law “has managed to regulate all the issues of using the Ukrainian language in the civil service, in everyday life, in other spheres, including the issues of language protection.”
But the language law will only achieve positive results if the state defends the rights of minority languages and relies on the powers of persuasion rather than coercion to get people to use Ukrainian. Importantly, no one can face criminal liability for violating the language law.
National minorities have also called for Ukraine to protect their languages. On July 16, Rosemary A. DiCarlo, the United Nations undersecretary general for political and peacebuilding affairs, recommended during a meeting of the U. N. Security Council that Ukraine pass “a law on the realization of the rights of national minorities of Ukraine to ensure a fair correlation between the protection of the rights of minorities and the preservation of the state language as a tool for integration within society.”
Domestic violence
On Jan. 11, Ukraine criminalized domestic violence through changes introduced to a number of laws. The changes also recognize sex without consent as rape.
Both these changes are seen as important accomplishments for Ukraine.
Then parliament speaker Andriy Parubiy, deputy speakers Iryna Herashchenko (L) and Oksana Syroyid (R), with member of parliament Mykola Knyazhytsky at the podium, celebrate the passage of a law to strengthen the Ukrainian language on April 25, 2019. (UNIAN)
These amendments are built on the foundation of the country’s law on preventing and counteracting domestic violence, which came into force in 2018. The law recognizes four different kinds of violence: physical, sexual, psychological and economic. In domestic violence cases, it also extends the protection of the legal system to family members like grandparents and siblings. Children witnessing domestic violence are also now recognized as victims.
“Often people call this draft law the ‘introduction of the Istanbul Convention,’” says Zlata Simonenko, a counsel at the Sayenko Kharenko law firm. The Istanbul Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women and domestic violence, to which Ukraine is a signatory, “encompasses all European practices for preventing violence in society in general.”
Domestic violence has long been a serious problem in Ukraine: alcohol abuse, unchecked male authority, and pent-up aggression in society all contribute to the problem.
As the war in Ukraine’s east calmed to a simmer and Ukrainian soldiers started to return home, social workers registered a notable surge in violence in the soldiers’ families.
Statistics show that 95 percent of domestic violence victims are women. The Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences has established that 68 percent of women in Ukraine (about 18 million people) suffer from domestic violence and about 20 percent suffer from systematic beatings by their husbands.
In 2017 alone, 600 women died in Ukraine as a result of domestic violence, Olena Stryzhak of the ‘Positive Women’ NGO told the UkrInform news agency, quoting official data.
Under the new laws, if a victim turns to the authorities for protection, “the whole spectrum of relations will be considered — for example, whether a woman is not employed, whether her husband often shouts at her, witnesses will be questioned,” Simonenko explains.
However, the laws leave out one important thing: the dissemination of information to prevent domestic violence.
“In our education system, there must be a separate program explaining that it is not part of living together or a family model when a husband or a wife reverts to violence,” says Simonenko.
Additionally, challenges remain in prosecuting rape.
“In court, it will be quite difficult to prove whether there was consent or not, and what is meant by the form of consent,” says Simonenko.
Legalizing imported cars
This year, the Ukrainian parliament helped to resolve a dispute between the country’s fiscal authorities and the owners of cars imported from Europe, but not registered in Ukraine.
Due to a loophole in legislation, Ukrainians could buy cars in the European Union and drive them into Ukraine without registering them and paying excise duties. Last November, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, introduced more liberal excise duties encouraging drivers to make their ownership of their cars official. The Rada also encouraged registration by establishing a grace period during which drivers can voluntarily register their cars and pay excise duties until Aug. 24, 2019.
In the first three months since the legislation was introduced, Ukrainians paid Hr 4.1 billion ($145 million) into state coffers, according to the data of the State Fiscal Service.
Eidos’ Taran believes that this was an important move by parliament as it “was a major socio-economic problem for many population groups.” Taran concedes that one “can evaluate this problem in many ways, but the issue bothering millions of car owners was resolved.”
Anchoring course
This year also saw the Verkhovna Rada passing laws that ensured the independence of the Orthodox church authorities from the Russian church based in Moscow.
The laws supporting the church are “a package of legislation that helped introduce the tomos to Ukraine,” Taran says. By tomos, he is referring to the decree from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople that recognized the newly unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine at the beginning of 2019.
An US F-15 fighter lands during an air force exercise at Starokostyantyniv military airbase on October 12, 2018. The large-scale air force exercises with the United States and other NATO countries “Clear Sky 2018”, which will run until October 19, are being held in western Ukraine. (AFP)
Taran believes that “the issue of reestablishing the Ukrainian church is extremely important, because church is one of the nation-building institutions.”
Just a month after Constantinople recognized the church — thereby granting it independence from the Moscow Patriarchate — the Verkhovna Rada introduced constitutional changes affirming Ukraine’s aspiration to full membership in the European Union and NATO.
While the Constitution can theoretically be reversed, constitutional changes are difficult to achieve. Although President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party has a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, it still does not have the 300 seats necessary to impose constitutional changes on its own.
Dmytro Razumkov, the leader of the Servant of the People, has stated that he would like to hold a referendum on Ukraine’s membership in NATO. He says he wants to do this to strengthen the Euro-Atlantic integration of the country, not undermine it.
But with no concrete steps taken in that direction, it is likely that the February 2019 constitutional changes are there to stay and Ukraine’s European path will remain a part of its foundational legal document.
One more politically relevant piece of legislation is the election code passed by parliament last July. During the next elections Ukrainians will know all the names of candidates on the lists of parties running for parliament. Prior to that Ukrainians usually knew only top ten candidates on party lists.
As the next elections are not forthcoming, the election code is still to prove its worth.
New finance regulations
In the previous year, the parliament also passed several new laws in the economic sphere, including the bankruptcy code.
Ihor Kravtsov, managing partner of Evris law firm, believes that this code will “regulate and streamline the bankruptcy procedure” of enterprises and additionally it “has introduced the bankruptcy of private individuals.” The bankruptcy code will enter into force in October 2019 and the market has big expectations as to its implementation, says Kravtsov.
In February 2019, Ukraine ratified the multilateral convention against shifting profits to off-shore havens (the MLI Convention). “Ratifying this convention allows Ukraine to fight money laundering more effectively and, in fact, it results in de-offshorization of Ukrainian business,” explains Kravtsov.
In Kravtsov’s opinion two more recent laws deserve mention: the law on reviving lending and the new law on currency and currency regulations. The law on reviving lending simplifies recovery procedures when a borrower can’t return the money. This will “help creditors to get their assets back, which will spur lending and repair the banking system,” Kravtsov says.
Meanwhile, the law on currency and currency operations passed in June 2018 liberalizes and simplifies international transactions for Ukrainian companies.
