Two committees are today in focus:

Committee on Family Matters, Youth Policy, Sports and Tourism

The 6^th session gave the committee room to polish the legal grounds for the state policies fostering family institution, national-patriotic nurture, physical culture and sports.

The 6^th session committee’s activities outline.

During the plenary session the committee carried on working over betterment of the legislative support for promotion of family institution, aid to families with children, state youth policy, national-patriotic nurture of the young and children, physical culture and sports, tourism, health resorts and recreation activity, and for provision of a parliamentary control over rigid adherence to the Ukrainian legislation in the above spheres.      

The session had fourteen committee’s sittings to have covered over eighty issues, twenty-three core draft bill conclusions were tabled to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine during the period. The committee proposed to consider and then take on the second reading three draft bills; nine bills on the first reading; three bills declined, one draft bill was put into the pipeline, etc.

Five Parliament’s resolutions were offered to accept on the first and second readings; twelve draft bill tentative conclusions were sent out to the relevant committees; six laws of Ukraine taken on the second reading and signed by the President of Ukraine.

For more details please be so kind to refer to the link:
http://komsport.rada.gov.ua/news/dijaln_komit/Inform_pro_rob_kom/zvit_pro_rob_kom/73752.html

Committee on Foreign Affairs

…held a meeting dedicated to the Ukrainian prisoners seized by the Kremlin.

Ukraine ought to establish an integrated coordinating centre dealing with liberation of Ukrainian citizens imprisoned illegally by Russia and in the temporarily occupied territories in the Crimea and Donbas as well. A special status and social support to those persons are to be delivered too. Those were the highlights of the wide meeting that gathered a series of the bodies of power, human rights organizations and families of the Kremlin-jailed, which took place in the Committee on Foreign Affairs headed by Hanna Hopko.

The meeting was also attended by representatives from the Presidential Administration, the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine, the Ministry for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons, the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, the Centre for Civil Liberties, other establishments and organizations.

There was a strong belief expressed at the meeting by participants at large that a more productive liberation of the Ukrainian prisoners could be achieved through establishment of an interagency coordinating centre and adoption of a relevant law on the prisoners’ status. The draft bill No.6700 recently submitted by Mustafa Dzhemiliev, was hoped to be the fine base provided revised.

“This law will anyway stiffen our stand on the prisoners’ liberation internationally and make it feasible to pay out social benefits to their families. The law must be accepted just after the recess,” Hanna Hopko said at the meeting.

An open letter to the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was handed over at the meeting by a representative of the prisoners’ relatives union. The letter calls on the President to organize a meeting with the relatives and establish a tighter coordination in liberation of the Ukrainian citizens.

Hanna Hopko, Head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs took part in a meeting with Kurt Volker, the United States Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations

Hanna Hopko, Head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Oleksii Riabchyn, a committee-man of the Committee on Fuel and Energy Complex, Nuclear Policy and Nuclear Safety and Oksana Syroid, Deputy Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (the Ukrainian Parliament) held a meeting with Kurt Volker, the United States Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations.

The US trouble-shooting envoy who has recently returned from the Donbas armed clash area, shared his trip experiences – a hot phase of the horrible conflict, not at all the frozen one as the West used to take it, the infrastructure ruined, the OSCE mission has no admission to the Ukraine’s uncontrolled areas, the ceasefire regime under permanent breaches... The trip findings, he said, would underlie the western measures to be taken to resolve the clash amicably.

H. Hopko underlined the acute need in further pressing over the Russian Federation with sanctions, being united at the conjoint position of the USA and the EU over the problem. As Russia seems to be a keen follower of the rule of force, Ukraine together with its western allies ought to stockpile new means of the pressure and the other productive tools beyond the sanctions.

Kurt Volker in his turn accentuated the need in supporting the people living under the temporary occupation so that they be in the know they are important to Ukraine.