Yushchenko expresses his vision of Constitutional reform (updated)

Speaking in the Parliament with annual report to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, President Victor Yushchenko stated his point of view concerning introduction of Constitutional reform, ForUm’s correspondent reported.

 

The President offered to form a Constitutional commission with the purpose to work out draft project of new version of the Constitution.

 

Yushchenko considers it necessary to conduct nation-wide discussion of the worked out draft and put it for All-Ukrainian referendum, to pass a number of legislative acts, which develop constitutional norms and provide for effective functioning of new Constitution.

 

“First of all, these are laws “About Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine”, “About President of Ukraine”, “Verkhovna Rada regulations” and others,” aid Yushchenko.

 

The President also informed that as a guarantor of observance of constitutional norms he considers “this way optimal from the point of unification of society’s tasks and legality of the whole constitutional process.”

“I am convinced that a social and political consensus can be reached,” Yushchenko said and added that he would not ask Constitutional Court to reconsider Law 2222 before this year’s March vote.

The Head of State remarked that real and complex political reform should be based on the following priorities:

1. involving the people in government decision-making;
2. instilling transparency and accountability into government;
3. balancing powers and functions to ensure stability of all branches of government;
4. delegating more authority to local government, preventing federalist tendencies, giving local communities executive powers and providing them with resources to use their powers;
5. fighting corruption, liberalizing mechanisms to render administrative services and ensuring political neutrality and social prestige of being an official;
6. adapting institutions of our political system and civil society to new social demands.

The President said all branches of government should interact and Ukraine’s political elite unite to assert these principles. The process to introduce new changes and improve political institutions should be transparent and impeccably legal to never question it later, Yushchenko remarked.