Denis Kovryzhenko
The next election to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine will take place on October 28 this year. Once again it will be based on a radically revised election law: on November 17, 2011, the Ukrainian parliament approved a new version of the Law “On Election of Members of Parliament of Ukraine”. The newly adopted law was developed by the Provisional Special Commission for Drafting the Law on Election of Members of Parliament of Ukraine established by the parliament on November 3, 2011. Although the Commission studied five drafts of the new version of the law on parliamentary election which at the time of its creation had been submitted for consideration by the legislators (draft laws # 9265, 9265-1, 9265-2, 9265-3 and 9265-4), the new version of the Law “On Election of Members of Parliament of Ukraine” was only based on one of them – draft law #9265-1 of 10.10.2011 submitted by MPs Yefremov, Sharov, Martynyuk, et al. The other drafts were either based on the current version of the electoral law, or introduced a completely new system for parliamentary election, i.e. the proportional system with the so-called “open” regional lists. Thus, their provisions were not taken into account when developing the recently adopted law. The reason for ignoring provisions of the other drafts in the new law was, among other things, the fact that representatives of pro-government factions had the majority at the Provisional Commission, and they favored draft Law #9265-1 as the basis for the legislation to be developed by the Commission. Therefore, from the very beginning of the Commission’s work, they mainly discussed provisions of that draft rather than alternative drafts submitted to the parliament during October 2011.
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