Open AccessREGULATION OF LOCAL REFERENDUM RELATIONS – A PRECONDITION FOR FURTHER IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DECENTRALIZATION REFORM
Author(s) -
V. M. Bozhko
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
pravova deržava
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2411-2054
DOI - 10.18524/2411-2054.2021.44.245079
Subject(s) - referendum , constitution , political science , law , parliament , decentralization , ukrainian , state (computer science) , relevance (law) , public administration , politics , philosophy , linguistics , algorithm , computer science
The article analyzes the prospects for the legal regulation of relations the organization and conduct of a local referendum in Ukraine. The relevance of the topic is due to a number of reasons: a local referendum is indeed one of the effective tools through which a territorial community can exercise its power directly. Therefore, this right is declared not only in the text of the Constitution of Ukraine. A number of special laws indicate that certain decisions can be made at a local referendum. However, the legal uncertainty that arose after the termination of the law of Ukraine “On All-Ukrainian and Local Referendums” and the recognition of the Law of Ukraine as unconstitutional by which the aforementioned Law was terminated, has not yet been eliminated in Ukraine. So the main attention in the article is directed to the analysis of the draft law “On local referendum” (register № 5512), submitted to the parliament on May 19, 2021 and sent on October 30, 2021 to The Venice Commission. The purpose of the article is to investigate the compliance of the content of the above-mentioned draft law with the Constitution of Ukraine and European standards embodied in acts of international organizations, of which our state is a member. In general, having positively assessed the content of the above draft law, the article substantiates the advisability of introducing a number of amendments into it due to Resolution 472 (2021) and Recommendation 459 (2021) “Conducting referenda at the local level”, adopted on May 18, 2021 by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and the decision of the European Court of Human Rights of October 21, 2021 in the case “Seligenenko and others v. Ukraine”. It is proposed: to allow to participate in the local referendum not only those citizens of Ukraine who registered their place of residence on the territory of the corresponding territorial community, but also those who registered their place of residence there and are taxpayers for at least six consecutive months; introduce the possibility of using electronic services when voting at a local referendum; to remove the norm that makes it impossible to simultaneously hold elections and a local referendum, and we also propose to determine the subject of the appointment of a local referendum not to the territorial commission from the local referendum, but to the village, settlement, mayor, chairman of the district, regional, district council in the city.