Civil Network OPORA continues the traditional live streams every Thursday. “OPORA Live” is a format of mini interviews with stakeholders who could impact political processes in the country. Today’s guest speaker was Fedir Venislavskyi, a representative of the President of Ukraine in the Constitutional Court, a Member of Parliament, an expert in constitutional and municipal law, specifically in state building and human rights. Olha Kotsiuruba, a legal advisor at OPORA, asked the guest’s opinio...

Draft law No 3294 has been registered in the Parliament. It suggests suspending the terms for consideration of citizen requests, requests for public information, and lawyers’ enquiries for the quarantine period. Civil Network OPORA is critical about the draft law deeming such restrictions as excessive.

The Parliament has a number of legislative initiatives registered, which were negatively assessed by the expert environment as restricting human rights in the certain regulations.

Ukraine will have to search for its own solutions to organization and conduct of local elections in case of having them under the quarantine, to think up a number of measures intended to minimize the risks, but all of it will bump into finance which resources are largely limited today.

On December 19, 2019, after eight years of consultations and negotiations between political actors, civil society, and the expert community, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine finally adopted a new election code. The final version of the code largely reflects recommendations proposed by civil society and election experts to ensure human rights and facilitate the political participation of various stakeholder groups, including IDPs and other internally “mobile” groups of citizens, voters with disab...

On December 19, 2019, after eight years of consultations and negotiations between political actors, civil society, and the expert community, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine finally adopted a new election code. The final version of the code largely reflects recommendations proposed by civil society and election experts to ensure human rights and facilitate the political participation of various stakeholder groups, including IDPs and other internally “mobile” groups of citizens, voters with disab...

Today, on April 16, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine plans to consider on its extraordinary sitting the Draft Law of Ukraine on Countering the Abuse of Parliamentary Powers in Law-Making (#1043). In particular, it introduces a special procedure for consideration of draft laws in the second reading. On the one hand, it is an attempt to introduce a mechanism against the "legislative spam", i.e. when MPs abuse their rights to make proposals to draft laws. On the other hand, such measures should be ...

On December 19, 2019, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted into law the Election Code of Ukraine. Its adoption and the entering into force of most of its provisions already in January 2020 marked an important step towards the harmonization of the legal framework for elections in Ukraine in line with the recommendations of international and domestic election observer missions.