The Initiative's achievements over the 1st quarter since its establishment have been discussed:

• The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (VRU) has arranged specially equipped places where applicants can work with information;
• A new "Processing" chapter has been added to the registers of draft laws on the VRU website;
• A mechanism for publishing texts of MPs' appeals and responses to them on the official parliamentary website have been developed;
• VRU's Open Data Portal is to be launched soon to publish complete and machine-readable data about MPs, draft laws, financial, and administrative data.

 

Next steps planned by the Initiative are described in two key documents on the Verkhovna Rada's reform: the Open Parliament Action Plan to implement the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, developed with UNDP support, and the Roadmap on internal reform and capacity-building for the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, developed by the European Parliament's Mission headed by Pat Cox.

 

The Initiative has prepared a comparative analysis of the two documents to understand how they supplement and reinforce each other and what practices should be lobbied and implemented first and foremost.

 

During the Monitoring Committee's meeting, Oleksii Sydorenko, Head of the Department of Automated Systems at the Verkhovna Rada's Secretariat, said that the draft order of the Head of the VRU Secretariat to determine employees of the Secretariat to be responsible for the implementation of the Open Parliament Action Plan and the Roadmap on internal reform and capacity-building for the Ukrainian Parliament, had already been prepared.

 

Finally, the participants discussed the reform of the parliamentary media. "Within the framework of one of the commitments of the Open Parliament Action Plan, Media Law Institute consulted the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on the specifics of the parliamentary media reform. By 30 April, Parliament is going to make a decision on the further reform of Holos Ukrainy (The Voice of Ukraine) newspaper and Viche (The Council) journal. The budgetary spending for the two editions made over UAH 14 million in 2015. Although the reform process is to begin in the following year, the funding is going to be reduced already this year," said Halyna Chyzhyk, MLI expert.

 

This initiative is organised under the framework of Democratization, Human Rights and Civil Society Development Programme in Ukraine, implemented by UNDP and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.