Further to the initiative by Congress Vice-President Yuliya Svitlychna (Ukraine, ILDG-GILD) to hold a statutory meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities (Council of Europe) in the Kharkiv region, the members of this Committee came together in the city of Kharkiv on 27 June 2017. In a message by President Petro Poroshenko to the Committee, the Ukrainian authorities underlined, in particular, the role of the Congress for the further development of local self-government in the country. “Best practices of the Congress create a conceptual basis for the decentralization reform which Ukraine has been successfully implementing over the last years,” confirmed Poroshenko. During the meeting, chaired by the President of the Monitoring Committee, Leen Verbeek (Netherlands, SOC), important draft texts were adopted including monitoring reports on Switzerland, Serbia and Italy, the fact-finding mission to Belgium ('functioning of the organs of local democracy in the context of linguistic diversity in the communes with facilities in the Flemish region around Brussels') and on electoral observation missions in Finland and Yerevan (Armenia).    

Press Release
Agenda
Letter by Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine