According to analysis conducted by experts from OPORA, CHESNO and Institute for Social & Economic Studies (ISES) current edition of the bill №4696 on amendments to Rules of Procedure of the Parliament of Ukraine, initiated by Andriy Parubiy, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, contains serious risks for Ukrainian parliamentarism. Therefore, CHESNO and OPORA suggest restarting bill preparation process with broad consultation on rules of procedure reform based both upon Europarliament recommendations and Declaration on Parliamentary openness.
Current edition of the bill does not provide an effective solution for the problems of low quality of proposed legislation and workload of the committees, as well, the bill does not propose an adequate mechanism to control MPs' work with their voters and does not regulate the parliamentary function of oversight good enough. In addition, approval of the bill in its current form can create following risks:
- The right to initiate legislation can be restricted due to political reasons. Under the proposed amendments, the no bill will be registered in Verkhovna Rada without providing conclusions from three parliamentary committees - anticorruption, budget and eurointegration committees. The time to process any bill will be reduced from 21 days to 15 days, though OPORA's research says that these committees are already not in time with their conclusions on the majority of the bills. If the bill will be adopted as a law, each of these committees will be able to block legislative initiatives due to political reasons, saying it has no time to draw a conclusion.
- The legislative agenda can be formed in a less transparent way. The nonpublic format of meetings of Committees Board may result in abuse of power. Furthermore, the fact, that only the heads of committees or their deputies will be the members of Committees Board could result in de facto appropriation of the will of parliamentary committeеs as collegial institutions by the heads of the committees.
Should be highlighted, that will be inconsistent to adopt a bill designed to improve the quality of legislative initiatives, completely ignoring the conclusion of Scientific and Expert Department of Verkhovna Rada, which recommended revising the bill.
The fact that already there were registered four alternative projects to the bill demonstrates that bill preparation process wasn't inclusive enough to satisfy all parliamentary stakeholders. Due to the fact that in democratic states any parliamentary faction or group will sooner of later become opposition, the rules of procedure reforms should satisfy both the majority and opposition side of parliament.
Therefore, considering undermentioned risks, Civil network OPORA, Civiс movement CHESNO and Institute for Social & Economic Studies (ISES) calls Ukrainian parliament to restart the broad consultation in order to prepare the bill that will satisfy all political powers in parliament, experts departments of Verkhovna Rada, NGOs, international treaties and recommendations.