Today, there is a need in Ukraine to introduce state supervision over local self-government’s compliance with the laws and the Constitution of Ukraine. It is exactly about supervision, and not control. The issue does not presuppose restriction of hromadas in their autonomy of making socio-economic decisions, but rather meeting the interests and ensuring citizens’ safety. Elaboration and adoption of the necessary law in this area will allow moving faster towards the implementation of decentralisation.

This idea was stressed by Hennadii Zubko, Vice Prime Minister – Minister of Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Communal Services of Ukraine, at the advisory meeting with the representatives of the Council of Europe, the Verkhovna Rada Committee on State Building, Regional Policy and Local Self-Government, heads of specialised associations of local self-government bodies, experts and international partners, in particular the U-LEAD with Europe Programme, on legislative regulation of the issue of compliance of local-self-government’s activity with the law.

The official emphasised that this is a regular advisory meeting, which was preceded by an event in the Kyiv City State Administration, as well as a powerful round table meeting at the Council of Europe office in Strasbourg in April this year, which resulted in the development of a detailed route map for the development of the relevant law.

“We have examples of the European countries entitled with the same powers, finances, opportunities and supervisory functions. There is a Polish example, where more rigorous state supervision is introduced – a voivod, holding a political office, unilaterally cancels the decisions of local self-government bodies, and the local self-government bodies themselves apply to the court with a lawsuit against the voivod’s decision. In Ukraine, we are considering the introduction of a “soft” model of state supervision, which operates in many European countries, when representatives of state authorities stop the decisions of local self-government bodies and at the same time apply to the court, proving their rightness regarding non-conformity of the local self-government’s decision to the law,” said Hennadii Zubko.

“Today we are facing problematic issues, related to failure of local self-government bodies to perform their duties. They include the restoration of critical infrastructure, untimely preparation of cities for the heating season, land issues, etc. Therefore, introduction of the state supervision tool will be a framework for strengthening cooperation between central and local authorities. And the main thing is the framework that will provide hromada development opportunities,” explained the official.

In his turn, Мårten Ehnberg, Head of Council of Europe Office in Ukraine, Representative of the Secretary General in charge of the co-ordination of the co-operation programmes in Ukraine, underlined that the Council of Europe supports Ukraine in carrying out reforms with decentralisation being among the key ones. “The issue of supervision over the activities of local self-government bodies is under our special attention, because Ukraine is one of the few countries in Europe, where such supervision system is absent. We will continue to assist Ukraine in finding the best solution, and we are convinced that we will achieve joint success,” he said.

During the advisory meeting a general Concept of Administrative Supervision over Local Self-Government Activities was presented and its main blocks were discussed, namely the general principles of administrative supervision, reaction measures and guarantees of meeting the interests of the local self-government bodies, and institutional provision of administrative supervision.