"EQUALITY DIRECTIVES" AS UNFINISHED LESSONS OF UKRAINE’S EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: TO THE ANALYSIS OF THE ISSUE

Abstract

The paper contains a retrospective analysis of the experience of implementation in Ukraine of a set of seven "equality directives" defined before the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. It was found that this part of the commitments under the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement did not receive proper gender expertise due to the lack of statistical data and the institutional weakness of the state bodies that implement it. The government’s legislative proposals designed to implement the "equality directives" were not passed by parliament. Some of them have not even been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada. Conclusions are drawn on very different ways of implementing equality norms in the countries that have joined the EU and in Ukraine, where these commitments still remain unfulfilled. It was found that, although the situation with the implementation of Equality Directives under the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement remains difficult for Ukraine, and now, in connection with labor reform can be an additional challenge in reforming national labor standards, it also allowed to test in practice the ability of the state gender equality bodies to ensure the implementation of such complex implementation tasks. It is concluded that the implemented work has left a number of challenges, but also allowed to clearly localize the problems that will affect the next steps in the legislative support of national gender equality policy. In particular, it is the lack of sectoral gender statistics and the lack of gender-disaggregated data in the sectors of the Equality Directives; lack of government’s gender expertise; lack of skills in consulting with stakeholders; insufficient coordination of gender issues that are cross-sectoral, even within the central executive body responsible for equality and non-discrimination. Conclusions are made on different ways of implementing equality norms in the countries that have joined the EU and in Ukraine.