Safe educational environment, new ministry, and StateGeoCadastre reshuffle: decisions by Government and President

Decision-maker: the President (via a decree).

Who is affected: schoolchildren, students, teachers, local government, the Government, the Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Finance.

What does it change:

• the document sets strategic goals and tasks for creating safe, comfortable, and healthy learning environment in schools;
• the Government is now obliged to annually adopt an implementation plan for the strategy;
• the strategy will be implemented at the expense of the government budget, local budgets, and other sources not prohibited by law.

What is wrong:

• according to the Constitution, the power to implement state policy on education belongs to the Cabinet. The President, on the other hand, has nothing to do with education;
• the Government and ministries form a separate branch of power (executive), so de jure the President has no power to give them instructions or set tasks.
• the President has no power to order the Cabinet or local government to pay for implementation of presidential strategies.

Decision–maker: the Government.

Who is affected: the Government, the Minister of Energy and Environment Protection, apparatus of the Ministry, entrepreneurs and employees in the spheres of the energy industry and environmental protection, Ukrainian citizens.

What does it change: the Ministry of Energy and Environment Protection is divided in two: the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Environment.

What is right:

• energy industry and environmental protection often clash with one another, so the Minister of Energy and Environment Protection always faced a possible conflict of interests in making a decision: to support the industry or to protect the environment;
• after the separation, the Minister of Energy will be able to concentrate on his strategic sphere while the new Ministry will stand for environmental protection and will balance the work of the Ministry of Energy.

What is wrong:

• decision to join these two ministers was made in September 2019. Their separation in less than a year is yet another example of inconsistent decision-making by the Parliament: changes to architecture of the Cabinet were made to fulfill the promise from Servant of the People party election platform.
• it takes a long time to launch a new ministry. The Ministry of Environment will begin to work properly in half a year at best, after filling competitive positions within the Ministry, funds and property allocation, and legal entity registration. The state policy on environmental protection will be implemented with a significant delay.

What next: Prime Minister Denys Shmygal has to propose a candidate for the Minister of Environment the Verkhovna Rada in the nearest future. For the meantime, the Government will appoint an acting minister.

Decision–maker: the Government.

Who is affected: Ukrainian citizens, landowners, villagers, farmers, StateGeoCadastre employees, the Government.

What does it change:

• Denys Bashlyk dismissed as the StateGeoCadastre Chairperson;
• Yulia Moroz appointed as acting Chairperson;
• ‘competition’ (without exams) for the Chairperson position announced.

What is wrong: during the lockdown, the recently formed Government has the power to dismiss virtually any civil servant and instead contract new personnel via a ‘competition’ that is reduced to a job interview. In other words, the Government now has an opportunity to fire anyone and hire ‘convenient’ people. And that is exactly what the Government is doing.

For more details, please read our blog Power games, or What is lying behind the dismissals of Verlanov and Nefyodov?

Decision–maker: the Government.

Who is affected: Ukrainian citizens, the State Property Fund of Ukraine, the Government, journalists, and anti-corruption activists.

What does it change: the State Property Fund will stop publishing information from the register of concession agreements in open data format.

What is wrong: the register contains information on agreement registration date, contracting parties, property in question, amount of payment, and end date. Withholding this information will substantially hinder watchdogs’ work and will facilitate corruption.

What next: according to the law On concession, the register is now managed by the Ministry of Economy, so the Government should urge it to publish information from the register of concession agreements in open data format.