Zelenskyy dissolved the commission that was working on the new Criminal Code of Ukraine

Zelenskyy dissolved the commission that was working on the new Criminal Code of Ukraine

President Zelenskyy disbanded the commission that was developing the new Criminal Code of Ukraine, member of the Commission on Legal Reform Mykola Havronyuk reported on his Facebook page.

A feature of this commission was that for about six years, a working group of Ukrainian experts operated within it, tasked with preparing a draft of a new Criminal Code to replace the current one from 2001.

According to Havronyuk, a participant in this now disbanded group, the new Criminal Code was developed and presented to the public.

The draft envisaged a radical overhaul of Ukrainian criminal legislation; however, due to its excessive complexity for practical application, the authors even created a special computer program for lawyers. It was supposed to help correctly qualify offenses under the new Criminal Code, taking into account the cumbersome digital designations of articles. For this reason, the project was repeatedly criticized by the legal community.

Instead of the three traditional categories of crime severity (minor, serious, and particularly serious), the draft introduced as many as nine degrees.

In the current Criminal Code, the maximum penalty measured in years was up to 15 years of imprisonment or life imprisonment.

The new draft established for particularly serious crimes of the 9th degree — for example, war crimes such as genocide or aggression — punishment up to 30 years in prison or life.

Under the draft, the murder of one person was classified as a crime of the 7th degree of severity with a punishment from 10 to 13 years of imprisonment.

In the current Criminal Code, for intentional murder, it provides for 7 to 15 years of imprisonment.

The draft contained numerous new types of crimes, such as «human cloning», absent in the current Criminal Code.

As noted by Havronyuk in his Facebook post, due to the war and the overload of pre-trial investigation bodies, prosecutor’s offices, and courts, the draft of the new Criminal Code has been put on hold at the state level: there is neither time nor resources for such large-scale changes.