Rada Rejects New Version Of Law On Constitutional Court

The parliament has refused to adopt the new version of the law "On the Constitutional Court."

The draft law No. 5336-1 received 179 votes, but it needed at least 226 votes to pass, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy put a proposal to return the draft law to the relevant committee for redrafting four times.

This proposal received a maximum of 223 votes.

After that, Parubiy announced that the draft law should be considered rejected.

Consideration of more than 900 amendments to the draft law lasted more than eight hours in the parliament.

Most of all the proposed amendments from the Batkivschyna faction were related to the proposed salary of Constitutional Court judges, which was proposed to be set at UAH 200,000.

In addition, parliamentary deputies opposed the relevant parliamentary committee's proposal to include abolition of secret ballots during appointment and dismissal of the human rights ombudsman in the final provisions of the draft law.

This draft law provided for changing the structure, powers, and procedure for selecting judges of the Constitutional Court and introducing a constitutional complaints procedure, under which a citizen can appeal to the Constitutional Court if he believes that the law applied in the final judicial decision in his case does not comply with the Constitution.

In addition, it provided for introducing a competitive procedure for selecting candidates for the position of Constitutional Court judge.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, the state budget for 2017 provides for increasing funding for the Constitutional Court by 73% to UAH 173.2 million, compared with 2016.