BY
On 16th November members of the exceptionally sage
Venice Commission quietly arrived in Kyiv.
Its reason for coming,
to cast a critical and wise eye upon the statutory legislative proposals required
to implement the changes to the Constitution of Ukraine regarding the judiciary
that came into effect from 30th September 2016.
For those readers
wondering why major legislative changes to the fundamental law of the land were
not simultaneously accompanied by statutory implementation/enabling legislation
(the processes, the how’s and the who’s etc) it should be noted that what
occurs now passes for timeliness and planning.
The Constitution (in which ever version) for more than
2 decades has always guaranteed a right to trial by jury – however nobody has
ever had a trial by jury because there has never been any statutory law passed
defining what a jury actually is, how it is composed, the processes, the how’s
and the who’s to form and dismiss one (or persons therein). As such this
long-standing constitutional right remains denied. (The argument
put forth by legislators when asked why this constitutional right is withheld
is that Ukrainian society is not ready for a jury system.)
Therefore, the statutory
legislative events surrounding constitutional change that entered into force
only a few weeks ago are occurring at lightening speed – and are timely
insomuch as is timely for Ukraine.
The Venice Commission
has now left. No formal “Opinion” has yet been released by the conclave
of wisdom that viewed, reviewed, pondered and prodded the draft text.
What changes, if any, were made during discussions is unknown.
Whatever the case, and
without awaiting the formal Venice Commission “Opinion”, the draft
statutory and enabling legislation will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada next week.
It remains to be seen if
the Verkhovna Rada will delay or prolong its internal procedures pending the
release of the Venice Commission “Opinion” – or not – prior to putting the
draft legislation to the vote. Nevertheless there appears to be the probability
that statutory implementation/enabling legislation may well appear to support
constitutional amendments within months of those amendments coming into force –
which must be approaching something of a record.
That said, even if that
implementation/enabling statute swiftly comes to pass making the constitutional
amendments to the judiciary more than otherwise semi-redundant prose, there
remains the matter of actual implementation – something likely to be far less
timely than the process thus far.
No comments:
Post a Comment