Decentralization most important Ukrainian reform - U.S. ambassador
KYIV. July 10 (Interfax) - The United States Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt hopes that a bill on constitutional changes will pass first reading in Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada during the next plenary week.
Speaking at a graduation and certificate-awarding ceremony for the 2014/15 Verkhovna Rada and government interns on Friday, the ambassador expressed his hope that next week the Ukrainian parliament will debate what is probably the most important of all reforms, namely: a number of constitutional changes that will allow conducting proper decentralization, introducing the European principle of subsidiarity and building the democratic European Ukraine everyone is striving for, said a spokesperson for the Ukrainian parliament.
According to Pyatt, under Speaker Volodymyr Hroisman, Verkhovna Rada made a number of very serious steps towards introducing deep strategic reforms at the legislative level, the spokesperson said.
The ambassador said that a new political culture is now emerging within the walls of the parliament, a new policy where deputies come here to serve to the Ukrainian people and assert the principle that this should always be a national body.
For his part, Hroisman said: "I too have been training for the past half a year, doing some kind of internship and gaining my own experience, a difficult and complicated one, but I know that it is within these walls that real reforms must be carried out, a real rebuilding of our state from being post-Soviet into becoming modern European."
The speaker stressed the need to reform the internal work of the parliament. "We will borrow the best experience of our European partners to make open, public and quality decisions to ensure a completely different quality to our laws and the broadest possible inclusivity in the discussion process," Hroisman said.
