The issues of restrictions which require the Ukrainian people to have a mandatory stamp of residence of registration, so called “propyska”, the level of public authorities and international human rights organizations and think tanks were raised up on February 23 in Kyiv. The debate was initiated by the СEDOS think tank supported by the International Renaissance Foundation’s initiative on think tanks development in partnership with the Think Tank Fund (TTF) and funded by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine.
The issues of restrictions which require the Ukrainian people to have a mandatory stamp of residence of registration, so called “propyska”, the level of public authorities and international human rights organizations and think tanks were raised up on February 23 in Kyiv. The debate was initiated by the СEDOS think tank supported by the International Renaissance Foundation’s initiative on think tanks development in partnership with the Think Tank Fund (TTF) and funded by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine.
For many years, the International Renaissance Foundation has been supporting initiatives that help to move the reform of public administration forward, promote better access to the Ukrainian government services and make the interaction between citizens and the authorities more comfortable and open. The presented research and a discussion on residence registration is the next step in this direction.
“The current institute of mandatory residence registration is hopelessly outdated and needs reforming. Experience of France and Portugal shows that a citizen can report his place of residence whenever it changes to the appropriate authority on his own and it never bothers good governance. Is Ukraine ready for such changes? To answer, we need a systematic analysis of the situation as one our CEDOS partners have run,” said Sophiya Golota, Democratic Practice Program Initiative Manager at the International Renaissance Foundation.
Residence registration today:
– distorts government statistics on the spatial distribution of the population (including the fact that the last census was conducted in 2001 and the amount of forced migration exceeded internal migration twice in 2014-15, registration institute does not reflect the actual movement of the population);
– creates disparities in local budgets (a part of taxes on income of natural persons paid in the territory goes to local budgets; unified tax paid by physical persons-entrepreneurs by the place of registration is a local tax; the horizontal alignment of fiscal areas as well as medical subsidy come from taking into account the rate of registered population, therefore unreliable statistics lead to the situation when amounts of redistributed funds do not meet the real needs of the region and this problem only sharpens due to the decentralization reform).
– restricts access of the population to receive administrative services, including social ones (most of the services are provided only at the place of registration because of the lack of a significant portion of electronic registers);
– limits access to health services (due to the nature of health care financing, visiting a clinic not at the place of registration can be complicated by some bureaucratic obstacles so people avoid to contact medical institutions, besides these situations create conditions for the spread of domestic corruption);
– restricts the right of non-registered community members to elect local government (citizens who don’t live at the place of registration can’t participate in local elections and elect their representatives in the communities they actually live in).
Analysts have prepared a paper based on the analysis of legislation and qualitative sociological research – Registration of Residence: Challenges for the State.
For additional comments on the projects of the Democratic Practice Program Initiative one can refer to its director Oleksiy Orlov or manager Sophiya Golota requesting a pr@irf.ua
