Ukraine’s Parliament fails on all counts

The civic network OPORA has given a pretty damning assessment of the first 100 days of the Verkhovna Rada’s work.  The term “work” can only be understood in the loosest possible terms since for 53 of the 100 days parliamentarians didn’t work at all.  20 days were supposed to be in plenary session, though only 10 proved to be working, with the other 10 spent on blocking parliament. 19 days were devoted to working groups; and 8 with voters.

OPORA’s monitoring looks at how actively MPs worked and the content of their legislative initiatives; parliamentary conflicts; how open parties were (or weren’t) about their funding; level of openness about administrative expenditure on MP corps and on the Off ice of the Verkhovna Rada.

Some MPs were reasonably active in submitting legislative bills.  Arseny Yatsenyuk from the Batkivshchyna faction – 51 draft laws; S. Mishchenko, Independent – 42; V. Yavorivsky – Batkivshchyna – 38; Petro Symonenko, Communist Party – 36; and Vitaly Klichko, UDAR – 32.  

The Party of the Regions is not mentioned.

During the 100 days the Verkhovna Rada passed 152 laws or resolutions, with 117 of these concerning early local elections.

7 MPs have still not reported to the Central Election Commission about their expenses during the election campaign.

Only the Communist Party answered OPORA’s information request about financial reports of party institutions for last year.