Lawyers say that should the Verkhovna Rada ratify the Rome Statute, it shall extend the jurisdiction of the ICC to investigate crimes committed on the territory of Ukraine. To date, 42 ICC member countries, including Ukraine, appealed to ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan and his office launched proceedings relating to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, not all legal procedures are accessible for Ukraine to bring the case to fruition because Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute.

The voting process in the first local elections, held on December 18, was accompanied by the same typical abusive practices as during previous elections, namely violation of voting procedure, obstruction of observers’ activity, falsification of election documents and presence of unauthorized persons at the polling stations.

The first local elections in the united territorial communities, scheduled for December 18, 2016, were mostly held in compliance with legal requirements and in observance of the principle of competitiveness. The abusive practices, recorded by Civil Network OPORA observers, weren’t large-scale or pre-planned, but still these violations should be duly investigated for the purpose of observance of the principle of inevitability of punishment for crimes against electoral rights of citizens. The c...

This OPORA report includes evaluation of the quality of election procedures and the overall election campaign; it was performed by OPORA’s official observers in October-November 2016.

The unusually low level of pre-election activity on the part of potential and registered candidates participating in election process, isolated cases of violation of legal requirements by candidates, public conflict between supporters and opponents of integration of territorial communities – such are the peculiarities of first elections in the united territorial communities scheduled for December 11 and December 18, 2016, which were recorded by public observers of Civil Network OPORA in Octob...

One of the most important factors of efficient management of the first local elections in the united territorial communities is the proper operation of the territorial election commissions, which are authorized to create single-mandate election districts or territorial election districts in order to held the elections of the people’s deputies for the relevant village, township and city councils, to register candidates and their agents, authorized representatives, representatives of local part...

The Parliament should immediately consider termination of office of the twelve commissioners with the expired terms and, subsequently, consider the President’s slate of nominees. Once the new CEC composition is approved by Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada should consider the amendments to the Constitution and to the Law on the Central Election Commission that seek to strengthen the independence of the Commission and enforce Commissioners to hold their posts and observe the legall...

Olha Aivazovska took the floor on the annual OSCE/ODHIR Human Dimension Implementation Meeting.Warsaw, 19 September 2016

Civil Network OPORA calls on the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to urgently consider President's submission of new CEC members and pass a decision in accordance with the Law of Ukraine on the Central Election Commission and the Rules of Parliamentary Procedure.

Speaking about the major trends of parliamentary by-election in 7 districts, we should mention that so-called technical candidates prevail in number over the real candidates. Besides that, visits of national politicians to electoral districts, incidents of indirect bribery and misuse of administrative resources became more frequent as the election day gets closer.

On Friday, 15 July, at 11:30 in the press-center of UNIAN Information Agency (4 Khreshatyk St., Kyiv) Civil Network OPORA is holding a press-conference on observation results of 17 July 2016 by-election of MPs in 7 single-member districts.

July 4, Kyiv. A discussion on Open data portal of Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine took place in Kyiv. A workshop "Analize Rada, the code to the community" took place as well for promoting work with open parliamentary data. The event was organized by Civil network OPORA with support of UNDP office in Ukraine.