Ihor Alekseev, Head of subcommittee on justice agencies and enforcement of court decisions, opening the meeting, reminded that the profile legislative act was approved by the parliament several times, and veto was imposed on it by the President several times as well. After that, it was attempted to enact some laws on statutory instruments, which have passed the first reading, but their adoption was not achieved.
“Thus, we have a discussion with either increasing or decreasing tone for almost 20 years”, he stressed.
I. Alekseev remarked that, at present, requirements to statutory instruments are regulated by various legislative acts. “We can see that, nowadays, issues of unified law-making and policy-making process are split between different legislative acts and bylaws of ministries and departments.
There are different approaches to policy making process and certain disputable issues. All this dictates the need for discussion and its urgency”, he said.
Andrii Rysheliuk, Deputy Head of the Main Scientific-Expert Department of the Administration of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, called attention to the current absence of signals indicative of urgent need in unified legislative act. He reminded that the last attempt to adopt the law on statutory instruments has failed. According to him, “We see no initiatives from the government, which is indicative of certain attitude of the government machinery to this problem”.
“Nevertheless, certain factors are indicative of the fact that a certain minimal body of statutory instruments related with these issues is still needed”, A. Rysheliuk said.
He believes that this law is needed. But, before initiating its specific development, it should be established what number of regulations should be included to its text, and how detailed they should be.
A. Rysheliuk also mentioned that failures to adopt the law on statutory instruments should be used to draw certain conclusions, experience on the issues that have to be absent in the text in order to make it advantageous. “It has to be free from political, departmental, personal or scientific ambitions, as these would exert negative effect on it. If we manage to develop an appropriate practical law, which does not claim to perform a certain revolution or reform, and would just aim to generalize, unify, and express the development of our legislative act forms which has occurred during the last 25 years in the law text, we can get a successful law”, he stressed.
Svitlana Mishura, Deputy Head of Main Legal Department of the Administration of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, a division head, stated in her addressing that this law on statutory instruments is actually needed. According to her, just adopting any law is not enough, the law has to be a high-quality one.
S. Mishura expressed a thought that the intervention into this law has to be carefully designed. She also mentioned that its development should be started from general issued with further refining.
Besides, the issues of urgency of statutory regulation of policy-making and law-making processes in Ukraine in the current conditions, advantages and drawbacks of a unified legislative act regarding statutory instruments were discussed during the “round table”.
The event participants remarked that adoption of a unified legislative act regarding statutory instruments may become a secure foundation for formation of high-quality Ukrainian legislation system.
Suggestions on the contents of the law on statutory instruments, in particular, regarding its system, types and hierarchy of statutory instruments; mechanism of development, adoption, and enactment of statutory instruments; accounting of statutory instruments etc. were made during the “round table”.