President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy chaired a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, which considered further steps aimed at resolving the situation that arose after the decisions of the Constitutional Court on anticorruption legislation.
The Head of State stressed the need to strengthen the responsibility for declaring inaccurate information and failure to submit a declaration by persons authorized to perform the functions of the state or local self-government.
This is the purpose of the relevant bill amending the Code on Administrative Offenses of Ukraine, the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code and other legislative acts to improve such responsibility, which was approved at a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council and will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada as an urgent.
"Many people's deputies stood against the sentence in the form of imprisonment. Therefore, a bill with a compromise version was adopted. And now we correct the mistake. I agree that this bill needs to be finalized so that there are no disputes over certain norms," Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov noted the importance of the law passed by the parliament on the restoration of responsibility for false declarations.
"And in order to enhance the responsibility for non-declaration of the assets by officials, so that they do not hide them, a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council was held today, at which a bill was approved and submitted to the Verkhovna Rada as an urgent with some revision," he said.
Andriy Kostin, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Legal Policy, believes that the issue of criminal liability for false declarations should be resolved in exactly the way required by Ukrainian society.
"Not only criminal liability must be restored, but also appropriate punishment for the fact that a person did not declare any of his assets and it was done intentionally and in a significant amount. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine supported the President's position on the restoration of such type of punishment as imprisonment for non-declaration and for inaccurate information in the electronic declarations of our officials," Andriy Kostin said.
The people’s deputy also reminded that the Venice Commission adopted a conclusion recommending the Verkhovna Rada not only to restore criminal liability for lying in declarations, but also to establish such type of punishment as imprisonment.