President Petro Poroshenko calls for the abolition of parliamentary immunity. "Resonant cases, the decisive steps to combat corruption, demonstrated by the Prosecutor-General's Office and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, remind us all about such an anachronism as parliamentary immunity," the president stated in a speech on the occasion of the Constitution Day on 28 June.
"My draft bill on the amendments to the Constitution is ready. All it takes is some political will from people's deputies: once and for all equalize themselves with the ordinary citizens of Ukraine. The way we have removed immunity from judges," Poroshenko said as he spoke near the Pylyp Orlyk monument in Kyiv.
In the opinion of the president, the Rada should adopt the amendments "in the nearest future."
"I hope that people's representatives will adopt this legislation in the near future because there's hardly any of them who has not pledged to scrap this immunity in their electoral programs," he stressed.
In 2015, President Poroshenko proposed a bill repealing the immunity of people's deputies and judges. At the same time, the Constitution should retain the norm that people's deputies are not legally responsible for the results of voting or statements in parliament and its bodies, except for the responsibility for insult or libel.
On 5 February, 2015, the Rada supported the referral of this bill to the Constitutional Court, which provided a positive conclusion in the summer of that year albeit with a number of comments. The Rada has not considered this bill ever since.