Draft law on political parties in Ukraine positive initiative, but creates risks of overregulation, unnecessary restrictions

Strasbourg, 22.03.2021 – The current initiatives to amend the legislation on political parties of Ukraine are welcome, but a top-down approach to ensure bottom-up democracy within political parties creates risks of overregulation and raises concerns of internal autonomy of political parties, said the Venice Commission and the OSCE/ODIHR in their joint opinion adopted at the latest plenary session of the Venice Commission on 19-20 March.

Many provisions of the Draft Law of Ukraine on political parties are in line with previous OSCE/ODIHR and Venice Commission recommendations. In particular, the drafters’ attempts to strengthen the transparency of the registration and functioning of political parties, to facilitate the process of registering political parties, to establish more effective funding and financial reporting requirements, to further delineate the powers of oversight bodies in terms of party finance monitoring and to ensure gender equality, are acknowledged and go in the right direction.

At the same time, the Draft Law overregulates matters that normally lie within the discretion of political parties themselves, which in turn raises concerns with regard to the internal autonomy of the parties.

OSCE/ODIHR and the Venice Commission make the following key recommendations for improvement of the Draft Law:

To substantially revise or delete the requirement for a party that wishes to be registered to form and register regional organisations in at least five electoral regions of Ukraine, as well as to remove the requirement of confirming registered parties within one year after their establishment. This dual certification appears to be a potentially burdensome step, especially as newly established political parties may not take part in elections until they have been confirmed.
To remove the requirement for political parties to register their members in a Unified Register of Members of Political Parties, as such a register disproportionately impinges on the rights to freedom of association of political parties and their members, and on the members’ private lives.
To revise disproportionate limitations on individuals’ right to donate to political parties and at the same time to lower the donation ceilings for individuals and for legal entities. The Venice Commission notes that while a number of changes to permissible donations to parties are positive, the provisions regulating under which circumstances individuals may donate seem to be unnecessarily restrictive, and at the same time, the overall ceilings for donating to parties remain quite high.
To define the mandates and competences of the oversight bodies more clearly, as currently these provisions are quite vague.
To introduce a wider spectrum of sanctions for different violations of the Draft Law in order to ensure that individual sanctions are better adapted to the gravity of an offence.