The Agency for Legislative Initiatives joined a meeting of Ukrainian civil society representatives with Pat Cox, former President of the European Parliament and Head of the Needs Assessment Mission to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
The discussions focused on urgent challenges and problems the civil society sector in Ukraine has faced, the need to maintain interaction with the authorities, including the Verkhovna Rada, and the next steps in this regard. The Agency highlighted the continuation of parliamentary reform in the context of a full-scale war as a cross-cutting aspect. This reform was launched in 2015 with the commencement of the European Parliament’s Needs Assessment Mission led by Pat Cox.
The mission developed a Roadmap with specific recommendations on how to strengthen the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine institutionally and solve the problems of Ukrainian parliamentarism, which ALI has repeatedly drawn attention to, as it has been supporting parliamentary reform and monitoring its implementation since the beginning. Indeed, the war has intensified the implementation of some of the Roadmap’s recommendations for internal reform of the Verkhovna Rada, although some improvements may require constitutional amendments, which is currently impossible. ALI analysed each aspect of the reform in a thematic Journal, which describes its current state in detail.
At the same time, the Ukrainian parliament continues to operate as the main legislative body of a democracy at war. Therefore, it needs to strengthen its subjectivity and capacity and, even in such circumstances, implement changes that help build resilience and sustainability of internal processes.
One of the components of such processes should be the adoption of the Code of Conduct for MPs, a document that will eventually introduce uniform standards of ethical conduct for MPs, a system of monitoring and oversight over their observance, and become an effective mechanism for distancing from MPs who discredit the entire institution.
