Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate – January 21, 2021 – Society
People’s Deputy Oleksiy Honcharenko registered Bill №4591 in the Verkhovna Rada, proposing amendments to the Housing Code, namely its preamble. The deputy considers it unacceptable that after more than 5 years after the adoption of the law on decommunization in 2015, the preamble of the Housing Code still mentions “the victory of the October Revolution”, “implementation of Lenin’s ideas of building a communist society”, “Communist Party housing program”, etc. things.
Moreover, he notes that since 2015, the Verkhovna Rada has twice amended the Housing Code, but all these “forbidden” things deputies ignored. Thus, the author of the bill proposes to thoroughly change the content of the preamble and thus bring it into line with current legislation – the requirements of the law on decommunization. To do this, the existing text on “Leninist ideas” is proposed to be replaced by the following:
“This Code regulates the implementation of citizens’ right to housing, housing management, its maintenance and preservation, legal relations of individuals and legal entities, public authorities, local governments in the housing sector.
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Conceptually, this proposal can be evaluated positively. However, it has one key drawback – outside the preamble, the law retains a number of anachronisms that also need to be excluded or at least updated. The code will continue to stipulate that Ukrainians have the right to housing “in accordance with the Constitution of the USSR”; that the powers in the field of housing have the Council of Ministers of the USSR, “local councils of people’s deputies” and other bodies that have not existed in nature for 20-30 years; that guerrillas who fought against Ukrainians during the Liberation War have the right to priority housing. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of norms that need to be excluded from the code or brought into line with current terms.
In this regard, the bill “On de-Sovietization of legislation” by Ruslan Stefanchuk looks more attractive. This draft, which concerns not only the Housing Code, provides for the removal of the preamble of the Housing Code of the Ukrainian SSR and its renaming to the Housing Code of Ukraine. Unfortunately, this document also removes not all outdated and long-outdated norms from Ukrainian legislation. Although it is worth noting that the exclusion of not all anachronisms is more than 150 pages of the comparative table! Therefore, this project, although it does not solve the problem in general, but can be the first significant step towards its solution.
