KIEV, July 27. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Constitutional Court will start the consideration of draft amendments to the country’s Constitution prepared by the Kiev administration on Monday. The constitutional reform in Ukraine is a basic requirement contained in the Package of Measures aimed at settling the situation in Donbass, which was approved by the leaders of the ‘Normandy Four’ and signed by the conflict sides in the Belarusian capital Minsk on February 12.
Ukraine should adopt a new Constitution by the end of 2015, which, in particular, envisages decentralization (with taking into account the distinctive features of separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions); permanent legislation on the special status of separate districts of Donbas; amnesty; the right to self-determination; local authorities’ participation in the appointment of the prosecutors and judges; the possibility of concluding agreements with the central power bodies and impossibility of early termination of powers of local deputies.
Donbas representatives have said that the submitted to the Constitutional Court amendments that have been drafted by the administration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko do not correspond to the Minsk principles. Last week, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) issued a joint statement demanding that Kiev include "in the Constitution text the description and spell out the permanent basis of the special status of Donbas." DPR chief negotiator in the Contact Group on the Ukrainian crisis settlement Denis Pushilin said that this should be done because "the transitional provisions are temporary and will become invalid in some 1.5 years." The republics insist on a detailed definition of the special status in the main text of the Ukrainian Constitution, on fixing in the Constitution of the special right of Donbass, first of all the right to equal relationship with Kiev authorities.
Under the agreements, Kiev should introduce in the country’s Constitution legal guarantees for the existence within Ukraine of separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with a special management status, Director of the Russian Centre for Current Politics Alexey Chesnakov said. "But this is the thing that President Petro Poroshenko is trying to avoid by introducing unilateral amendments to the Fundamental Law," he told TASS.
Now, he says, Poroshenko will present his actions not coordinated with the [DPR and LPR] republics as the fulfillment of the Minsk-2 accords and demand that DPR and LPR turn over control of the border with Russia to Kiev.