In a letter to the Venice Commission, the civic initiative “Honest Elections for the Future’s Sake” says that the proposed law on the parliamentary elections is unacceptable and a step backwards.

“In the assessment of many Ukrainian legal specialists and political analysts, the draft law is a major step backwards in the development of Ukraine’s electoral and party system”, the document reads.

The authors of the appeal believe that “a return to the parliamentary electoral system which was used from 1998 to 2002 will resurrect all the failings of past elections. “.

Such failings include “political corruption in the formation by parties of their electoral lists and an increase in influence of the executive branch of power, primarily regional, on the final results of the elections in single-mandate constituencies.”

“A return to a combined (parallel) system at parliamentary elections breaks the promises which Ukrainian politicians gave their voters”.

The civic initiative states that they are undertaking a number of public measures aimed at ensuring professional discussion of the parliamentary electoral system that Ukraine needs and drawing up the appropriate amendments to electoral legislation.

They ask the Venice Commission to take their position regarding the inadmissibility of the draft law into account during the Commission’s assessment.

The appeal is signed by Ihor Zhdanov, President of the Open Politics Centre; Mykola Onishchuk, former Minister of Justice and President of the Legal Policy Institute; Ihor Koliuszkho, Head of the Board of the Institute for Political and Legal Reform; Victor Chumak, Director of the Ukrainian Institute for Public Policy; Oleksandr Chernenko, Head of the Board of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine; Oleksy Haran, Director of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy School of Political Analysis and Natasha Bohasheva, Director of the Institute for Electoral Law.