Amendment by Poroshenko provides for putting off Rome Statute ratification for three years

It was President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, who submitted the amendment on the possibility of ratification of the Statute in three years.

This was stated by Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Commission Viktor Musiyaka during the workshop on the exchange of experience between experts and parliamentarians on the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Human Rights Information Centre correspondent reports.

“We need to do everything possible to ratify the Rome Statute as soon as possible so that we could in a civilized way protect the rights of our people which have been violated for two years and are further violated in Crimea and eastern Ukraine,” Viktor Musiyaka said.

He suggests preserving the bill No.1788 authored by Vitaliy Kupriy and other 155 MPs, adding the wording “Ukraine recognizes the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in accordance with the Rome Statute.” Viktor Musiyaka also suggests stipulating in the transitional provisions that Part 6 of Article 124 comes into force when the Rome Statute is ratified and urges to work towards its ratification.

“I did not even know that the amendment about three years appeared in the wording of the President. Of course, he is not obliged to comply with the Commission’s recommendations, but we did not offer such wording,” Musiyaka said.

The Deputy Chairman of the Commission is surprised at the three-year term of non-ratification of the Statute.

The Professor believes that there is a misunderstanding of what the International Criminal Court is in the Ukraine’s political environment.

Earlier, Vice Speaker of the Parliament of Ukraine Oksana Syroyid reported that the Parliament lacked 300 votes to ratify the Rome Statute, which was the sole reason for postponing this issue for three years.

However, the human rights activists called on the Ukrainian Parliament to consider the draft law No.1788, which removed legal obstacles to ratification.

According to the human rights defenders, the ratification of the Rome Statute is not simply the implementation of the Association Agreement requirements, it’s nearly the only possibility to conduct the investigation in the temporarily occupied territories and bring perpetrators of the war crimes to the international justice.