Working language in higher education, privileges for prospective university students, and more restrictions for acting ministers: new draft bills in the Parliament

26 June 2020
Working language in higher education, privileges for prospective university students, and more restrictions for acting ministers: new draft bills in the Parliament
Home > Monitoring > Working language in higher education, privileges for prospective university students, and more restrictions for acting ministers: new draft bills in the Parliament

Change of working language in higher education (3685)

Bill sponsor: Oleh Voloshyn, Opposition Platform — For Life faction.

Who is affected: Ukrainian citizens, students, university teaching staff, heads of higher education establishments, the Ministry of Education, the Cabinet.

What does it change:

  • the state will guarantee an opportunity to get higher education in languages of national minorities and indigenous people, promote learning of the official UN languages (one of the official UN languages is Russian)
  • higher education establishments will be allowed to teach classes in the UN and the EU official languages, national minorities and indigenous people languages
  • representatives of national minorities or indigenous people will have a guaranteed right to get higher education in their languages (by studying in separate groups)
  • private universities will get the right to freely choose their working language.

What is wrong:

  • the law On state language already provisions that higher education establishments are allowed to teach classes in languages of the EU. The right to learn in their own languages for indigenous people is regulated by a separate law. Thus, the draft bill in fact aims at promoting the Russian language
  • under the current circumstances — ongoing Russian hybrid war against Ukraine, occupation of Crimea and parts of the Eastern Ukraine by Russia, — education is a matter of national security. Any sensitive changes to educational policies have to be calculated and in line with state security strategy.

Enrollment privileges for some prospective university students (3734)

Bill sponsor: the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.

Who is affected: Ukrainian citizens, prospective university students from the temporary occupied territories, children of those who have died in the line of duty (war veterans, national guardsmen, police officers, border patrol officers, state emergency servicemen, and state security servicemen), children of medics who have died of coronavirus.

What does it change:

  • children of those who have died in the line of duty (war veterans, national guardsmen, police officers, border patrol officers, state emergency servicemen, and state security servicemen) and children of medics who died of coronavirus will get a university enrollment privilege. They will have their quota for priority university admission and still compete to get the privilege.
  • children from the temporary occupied territories and frontline localities will get the right to enroll without competition (but also limited by a quota). They will also have an opportunity to enroll for pre-entry university courses, receive stipends, and enroll as IDPs in future.

What is wrong:

  • privileges and quotas devalues the idea of proper preparation for enrollment, calls into question the equality of prospective university students, and ruins the competition: state policy is to give education to the best students
  • special procedure for children from the temporary occupied territories and frontline localities makes external independent evaluation irrelevant and provokes a conflict between these children with other privileged prospective students obliged to compete
  • if the bill is adopted, it will give an incentive to register prospective students within the temporary occupied territories just to get a chance for non-competitive enrollment.

Alternative solution: it is more effective to introduce stipends for these prospective students instead of imposing enrollment privileges and quotas.

More restrictions on acting ministers (3700)

Bill cosponsors: Nelli Yakovliava (Servant of the People faction) and Aliona Shkrum (Batkivshchyna faction).

Who is affectedacting ministers, deputy ministers and first deputy ministers, the Cabinet.

What does it change:

  • acting ministers will be deprived of a number of minister’s powers. In particular, they will not be able to approve the structure of a ministry and its territorial bodies, create, liquidate, or reorganize territorial bodies of a ministry
  • the Cabinet will be obliged to propose a candidate for a ministry head no later than 30 days after such a position becomes vacant.

What is right:

  • the Government can work properly only when fully staffed as provisioned by the Constitution. If some ministry is managed by an acting minister for too long, the legitimacy of the Cabinet and the level of its cooperation with the Parliament become doubtful
  • acting ministers should not exercise all the minister’s powers, since they are not appointed in a way provisioned by the Constitution and do not take full responsibility for their actions.

What is wrong: the bill does not provision any penalties for delays in proposing candidates for a ministry head position, so the Cabinet will be able just to ignore it.