Constitutional Committee approves draft of Ukraine's new constitution

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Calling it a "historic event" in Ukrainian state-building, Deputy Volodymyr Stretovych told reporters a draft constitution had been approved by the Constitutional Committee on March 11 and would be submitted to the Parliament in the near future.

Mr. Stretovych, chairman of the judicial/legal reform subcommittee of the Constitutional Committee and a member of the parliamentary faction Agrarians for Reform, joined Parliament Chairman Oleksander Moroz at a press conference on March 11 after 26 members of the 40-member Constitutional Committee voted "to approve and submit for review by the Supreme Council the draft constitution of Ukraine and to take into account remarks and proposals of the Constitutional Committee." Only 33 members of the committee were present at the meeting; Mr. Moroz abstained from voting.

Despite a thumbs-up sign from Deputy Oleksander Yemets, a member of the Constitutional Committee who walked out of the seven-hour meeting exhausted and exhilarated, most national democrats who attended the meeting, chaired by Mr. Moroz and President Leonid Kuchma, agreed that the mood was turbulent and feisty, as members of the left-wing political forces often clashed with centrist and democratic leaders.

Mr. Stretovych pointed out that this is the first time since October 1993 that the Parliament will be presented with a single draft of the constitution to review.

Now, it seems the real battle has just begun.

In an interview with Interfax-Ukraine, Ukrainian Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko said that although the draft constitution will make it to Parliament, "there will be no true parliamentary consideration of the draft constitution."

"The president's administration will do its utmost to push through its own version of the draft. They will resort to the kind of methods they used to pass the Constitutional Accord," he added, stating that he thought the mass media would be enlisted to pressure deputies to adopt the new constitution.

President Kuchma, who did not attend the press conference at the end of the day's work, later told members of the Reforms, Statehood, Agrarians for Reforms and Center factions that the decision to submit the draft document to the Parliament was a "landmark political event."

He condemned the attempts by left-wingers in Parliament to impede the constitutional process and recalled the long, drawn-out battle to draft the Constitutional Accord, which took more than eight months to conclude because of less than constructive work within the Supreme Council.

Indeed, the left forces in Parliament have said they want to examine the draft constitution in detail - going over each of its 162 articles individually. They have also threatened to submit their own version of a draft constitution, an unlawful move that would cause further bedlam in the legislature.

Furthermore, left-wingers, among them Mr. Moroz, have also tried to wrangle out of their commitment to this Constitutional Committee, stating that it does not have the legislative authority to draft such a document, implying that this should be done by the legislative branch.

Minister of Justice Serhiy Holovaty, also a member of the Constitutional Committee, noted that as co-chairman of the committee along with President Kuchma, Mr. Moroz has tried to play his own political game. "He wanted us to accept the draft as merely a foundation with which the Parliament could begin its work. In other words, he wanted to put an 'x' on the whole constitutional process," explained Mr. Holovaty.

"Those forces that want to drag out the constitutional process are causing Ukraine great harm," he added. "And at this point, I am not talking about the contents of the [draft] constitution - these are only details. Because, today, what concerns me is the problem of survival. And that very much depends on whether or not Ukraine will have its own constitution before the elections in Russia. Presidential elections in Russia are scheduled for June 17.

"You know the sovereignization of Ukraine began not in Kyiv, but in Moscow. And independence, let's say, fell upon us, and was used by the Communists of Soviet Ukraine only after the events in Moscow [the August 1991 coup]. To be sure, the presidential election results in Russia will have a direct influence on the situation in Ukraine," said Mr. Holovaty, who is also a deputy in the Supreme Council, a member of the Reforms faction.

Mr. Yemets underlined, "This seems absurd. For five years we tried to form a Constitutional Committee whose main goal would be to draft a constitution. And now that this has been done, we are being told that we don't have the authority to do this. I thought all along this was our mandate."

According to its mandate the Constitutional Committee remains a working body until a new constitution is adopted.

It remains unclear how the new constitution will be adopted, for the procedure on adoption of the constitution has not yet been adopted by the Parliament.

A constitutional majority (two-thirds) of parliamentary votes are needed for adoption of the new constitution, but almost everyone, from the president's administration to the left-wingers and even independent legal experts, realize that for the current Parliament to achieve this would be nothing short of a miracle.

So, a second alternative has been presented by the national democrats. They would like to see the constitution adopted by a simple majority (50 percent plus one of the deputies), then returned to the president, who, in turn, will call a national referendum on the issue.

The Rukh Party has already issued an appeal to President Kuchma, asking him to set a stringent deadline by which the Parliament must adopt the constitution - no later than June 1996 as set by the Constitutional Accord signed between the two branches of power last June. In case this does not happen, Rukh has asked that President Kuchma hold a referendum on the draft constitution approved by the Constitutional Committee.

"The adoption of any draft constitution by two-thirds of this Supreme Council is impossible," said Mykola Koziubra, a member of the committee that drafted the document and an expert n constitutional law.

"I can't even be sure that the Parliament will be able to get enough votes for a simple majority," said Vyacheslav Chornovil, the leader of Rukh and its parliamentary faction. "But we need not worry, because the Constitutional Committee is a legitimate body, representing all factions in the Parliament, all the powers of the state. So, we have a legal document approved by the committee. A first step has been made."

"I predict that events will unfold in the following manner: the left forces will try to stretch out reviewing the document as long as possible - sometime in the summer or fall," he noted. "Or they will try to block the Parliament's work, which will give the president the opportunity to call a national referendum," said Mr. Chornovil.

"There is no need to fear a referendum," added Volodymyr Shapovalov, also a member of the Constitutional Committee and an authority on constitutional law. "A referendum is a classic form of popular rule, an example of direct democracy. 'Vox populi, vox Dei,'" he added.

Crimea and the constitution

Although the draft constitution has quite a number of controversial points covering such issues as the responsibilities of the president and the structure of the legislature, among the points that have raised the most concern is the future status of the Crimean peninsula.

In the draft constitution - which may be available for distribution in the Parliament and perusal by March 20 - the Crimea has the status of autonomous republic. Members of the committee have agreed that there can be no republic within a republic, and have discussed the possibility that the Constitution of the Crimea be reduced to a charter of autonomy.

Indeed, the Crimean Parliament was so disturbed about rumors that its autonomy may be canceled that it called an emergency session on Sunday, May 10, and asked that the Ukrainian Parliament endorse the Constitution of the Crimea before the end of March. Otherwise, they noted that deputies of the Crimea reserve the right to endorse their own constitution via a referendum on the peninsula.

A Ukrainian parliamentary committee headed by Mr. Stretovych has been appointed to travel to Symferopil within the next few days to review the situation.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 17, 1996, No. 11, Vol. LXIV

| Home Page |