The Verkhovna Rada session was not long on December 9. Speaker Volodymyr Hroisman delivered a ceremonial speech, in which he said that parliament should work fruitfully in these difficult times – there were all conditions for this because the MPs had elected committee heads. The same question became a stumbling block again for coalition factions. Radical Party members blocked the podium from which Oleh Liashko was speaking. The party’s demand was that the deputies who had voted for the “January 16 laws” be barred from leading the parliamentary committees. “The Radical Party faction is blocking the parliamentary rostrum in protest against the part of the resolution that deals with the appointment of the Regionnaires who voted for the ‘January 16 laws’,” Liashko said.
Earlier, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction member Serhii Leshchenko had written on his Facebook page the list of these MPs who were given leading posts in the committees: “Bobov, Derkach, Katsuba, Bohuslaiev, Shypko, Kisse, Hirshfeld, Bondar, Shkiria, and Klimov. In particular, Derkach, Katsuba, and Klimov were nominated as first deputy chairmen of the budgetary, economic, and banking committees, respectively.”
Deputy Speaker Oksana Syroid thus explained this parliamentary decision: “The decision was in accordance with Article 81 of the Verkhovna Rada Rules and the requirements of international organizations and representations. As an authorized person, I could not but sign the decision… As ‘January 16’ is not a juridical criterion, the lawyers who formulated the final version of the resolution’s text had no reason at all to make any changes in it. And the parliament’s speaker could not but sign it.”
All the coalition factions supported the Radical Party’s position. “We are trying to bring everything into line with moral and legal standards,” Samopomich faction leader Oleh Bereziuk says to The Day. “The Radical Party’s action reflects, by all accounts, its own situation. They wanted to be represented in the budgetary committee, but this did not happen. But this is not a problem today. The main points the committees are going to work on in the nearest days are the Tax Code, the Budget Code, and Ukraine’s budget for 2015.”
“The committee leadership was voted on in toto, which was a wrong thing to do because it was necessary to delete the people Liashko mentioned from the list,” Popular Front representative Andrii Teteruk says.
Parliament finally put a resolution on committee changes on the session’s agenda. Besides, the Rada approved the calendar plan of work, under which the MPs will work until January 16. The people’s deputies also put on the current plenary session’s agenda a draft resolution on requesting the Russian State Duma and president to free the Ukrainian Parliament member Nadia Savchenko as well as bills on introducing changes to some laws (to ensure and guarantee Ukraine’s security) which call for the cancellation of Ukraine’s nonaligned status. Following this, Speaker Hroisman closed the sitting and fixed the day of a faction chairpersons’ meeting. The Rada will meet again on Thursday, December 11.
