Ukrainian parliament waits for new bill on mobilisation in early February

Members of the Ukrainian parliament are waiting for the second version of the draft law on improving mobilisation in the first week of February, but so far, the government has not changed its proposals much.

Source: article by Ukrainska Pravda, "Who and Whom. What is happening with the mobilisation law" (English translation to follow shortly).

Details: UP sources in different political factions in the Verkhovna Rada say that the parliament expects to see a new version of the document around Tuesday, 6 February.

On 16 January, lawyers from the Defence Ministry submitted their findings for examination by the heads of all factions.

Quote: "We are, to put it mildly, upset because we do not see any significant improvements in the text. It is unclear what has actually been rewritten. We will not be able to gather votes under a different phrasing of the same thing as the original version. It really needs to be rewritten," said one of the influential members of the Servant of the People party.

Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers (the government) held an unscheduled meeting on 11 January to withdraw Bill No 10378 on improving mobilisation, military registration and military service and immediately prepare a new one, but so far, the Cabinet of Ministers has not submitted it to the Verkhovna Rada.

UP sources say that not only opposition forces but even a significant part of the Servant of the People party were reluctant to support the first draft law. During a meeting of the faction, MPs from the president’s party spent over an hour arguing and expressing indignation about various controversial provisions.

The problem is that no one wants to take responsibility for decisions unpopular with the public and dubious from a legal standpoint. After several weeks of active discussion on new mobilisation, government institutions have already suffered a blow to their ratings.

At the same time, several alternative draft laws on mobilisation have been registered in the Verkhovna Rada. Therefore, when the government submits a new draft to the Verkhovna Rada, it will receive a different registration number, and parliament must consider the already registered drafts first.

MPs have already voted on a draft law on creating a unified electronic register of conscripts and the automatic issuance of military combatant certificates. However, this draft also had some issues.

The Defence Ministry wanted to obtain data from the registries of the Tax and Migration Services, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Central Election Commission, and other agencies to create a unified digital database of conscripts. Additionally, they sought access to the phone numbers and emails of conscripts. All this data was supposed to be stored in the cloud in NATO countries.

As several sources within various factions informed Ukrainska Pravda, opposition factions rejected a series of initiatives from the ministry before voting on the second reading of the draft law on creating a unified electronic register. This rejection included access to tax and customs data, information about family, medical records, etc.

Even MPs cannot confirm the final version of the voted-on bill because "the text is being finalised in the parliament’s legal department".

"No intelligence service in the world possesses as much information about citizens as the Ministry of Defence requested. We understand that digitisation is needed, but this is too much," explained a member of the Committee on National Security to Ukrainska Pravda.

"The problem with the law is that it is formulated in such a way that no one would be held responsible in the event of leaks or theft of citizens' personal information," added another source from one of the opposition factions.

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