The President signed on May 29 the decree “On Forming a Commission to Draw Up Amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine and other Bills Proceeding from the Results of the Public-Initiated National Ukrainian Referendum.” This is what Leonid Pidpalov, deputy chief of the President’s staff, told The Day. In his words, this commission will be dealing with the referendum’s third and fourth questions — on the reduction of the number of deputies and a bicameral parliament, respectively. “Clearly, the number of deputies cannot be reduced automatically or mechanistically to 300. This can only happen in accordance with a new law on parliamentary elections, and, no doubt, essential changes should be made in the Constitution of Ukraine because of the formation of a bicameral parliament and reduction of the number of deputies,” Mr. Pidpalov noted.
Mr. Pidpalov once was member of the Constitutional Commission which was drawing up the Fundamental Law in 1994-1996, then he was part of the Constitutional amendments working group, and, finally, the latest decree appointed him member of the newly -formed commission. According to him, the commission will include representatives of both the Presidential and parliamentary sides, and the parties, the judiciary, the law-enforcement bodies, NGOs, and academics. “The President has set up, as he has promised before, a commission representing practically all the strata of Ukrainian society — this is a cardinal point no matter whether somebody likes it or not,” Mr. Pidpalov said.
The decree sets out that the commission draw up the respective bills before the end of 2000.
Political scientist Mykola Tomenko believes that another referendum may be required to implement the results. He pointed out at a press conference the Monday before last that a Constitutional Commission should be formed to make amendments to the Fundamental Law. The political scientist thinks that both bills, now under Constitutional Court scrutiny, are imperfect and run counter to social demands. In his opinion, the flaw of the President’s bill is that “the jurists and the team decided not to explain the logic of Constitutional changes submission. It is not clear from the President’s bill what a parliamentary majority is, in what way parliamentary immunity is to be limited, and how a bicameral parliament is to be formed.” As to the bill drawn up by a group of people’s deputies, he thinks it is “a variant of the new Constitution of Ukraine providing for the parliamentary-presidential form of government.” The political scientist thinks the main flaw of the deputies’ bill is that the latter contradicts the referendum results. Besides, this bill “in fact legitimizes the parliamentary model of government.”
People’s Deputy Volodymyr Filenko also believes neither of these bills will help secure 300 votes required for amending the Constitution. In his words, today “174 VR deputies stand firmly by the President’s bill and approximately the same number by the deputies’ bill, with others still in two minds.” So Mr. Filenko admits that a “strong-arm option” may be the most likely way of implementing the referendum results.
In general, it is still unclear how the conflict between different approaches to amending the Fundamental Law will be resolved, and no political scientist is so far able to finally forecast which way the President and parliament will go and when the changes will be introduced. What is clear is that the commission being set up the President will work diligently until the New Year. But this does not mean at all that parliament will have adopted the commission’s proposals by that date. Bearing in mind that it took the Constitutional Commission two years to draw up the Fundamental Law, we cannot rule out that the newly-formed commission will also require a long period of time to submit its proposals.
