Ukraine wants to join the European Union by 2027. On 28 April 2026, its parliament spent 17 minutes adopting an 803-page Civil Code that the EU ambassador in Kyiv, the country’s leading human rights lawyers, and around 30 Ukrainian NGOs say contradicts European law on women, sexual minorities, the press, people with disabilities, and property rights.
EU Ambassador Katarína Mathernová told NV that Brussels is “analyzing” the text.
Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk told RBC Bill 15150 moves Ukraine away from Soviet-era private law toward European standards. EU Ambassador Katarína Mathernová told NV that Brussels is “analyzing” the text. She acknowledged the Civil Code “needed to be updated for decades” and said reform was “necessary.” But: “When complex questions get short answers, that is always a problem.”
The vote took 17 minutes of debate. Seventeen minutes for the document that governs how the country treats its women, its children, its minorities, its journalists, its companies, and the dead’s property. The text was registered on 9 April and voted three weeks later. The previous version, Bill 14394, had been withdrawn in January after public outrage over a clause allowing pregnant teenagers to marry at 14.
Civil Code “is a document that under normal conditions can be discussed for years. In this case, everything happened in express mode.”
Mariia Klius, a norm projection lawyer, told Radio Svoboda that the Civil Code “is a document that under normal conditions can be discussed for years. In this case, everything happened in express mode.” Almost no ministry, she said, had time to file its conclusions before the vote.
The story matters at a moment when Ukraine’s reform engine is stalled. Three months into the 10-point plan Deputy Prime Minister Taras Kachka and Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos signed in Lviv last December, an independent expert coalition led by the New Europe Center rated Ukraine’s progress at 9 points out of 100—zero on prosecution reform.
45 mentions of one word
The most-debated word in the new code appears 45 times: доброзвичайність—“good morals,” in the loose English rendering. Stefanchuk wrote on Facebook that the term renders boni mores, a European legal standard used in German, French, and Dutch civil law. Attacking “good morals” as vague, he argued, would also undermine “integrity” or “virtue” (доброчесність)—the integrity standard used to vet judges, prosecutors, and anti-corruption officials.
The drafters wanted a word with European linguistic roots and translatability.
A second co-author, Mykhailo Khomenko of Taras Shevchenko National University, told RBC the term replaces a Soviet-era formulation—“moral principles of society,” from the 1963 Civil Code of Soviet Ukraine that explicitly referenced “the moral principles of a society building communism.” The drafters wanted a word with European linguistic roots and translatability. Khomenko points to French bonnes mœurs, German gute Sitten, and Roman boni mores.
Civil law has always run on evaluative concepts—good faith, reasonableness, justice—without dispute. One concrete use case: blocking trademark registrations like “Bucha Kombucha” or “Bakhmut” vodka.
Project manager at the Human Rights Center ZMINA, Iryna Yuzik, told Espreso the practical effect is that “whoever has more power and more authority will define these moral criteria.” The term threads through dozens of articles as grounds for exceptions to general legal rules—divorce, family relations, contract disputes, dignity claims.
“The draft does not ground itself in European Court of Human Rights case law.”
MP Inna Sovsun of the opposition Holos faction has flagged a particularly direct application: Article 317 lists protected categories against discrimination—sex, age, race, disability, weight, body type, manner of behavior—but allows discrimination where required to “protect good morals.”/
Volodymyr Yavorskyy, board member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union and program director at the Center for Civil Liberties, framed a deeper problem in conversation with Euromaidan Press. “The draft does not ground itself in European Court of Human Rights case law,” he said.
The human-rights chapter, he added, “looks like it was written by people very far from human rights.” Society expected EU-aligned modernization, Yavorskyy said—not a text reading as if “written by conservatives from the 1980s or 1990s.”
What it does to women
Couples filing for divorce can be sent into a six-month reconciliation period—and that period becomes mandatory if the couple has children. A separate provision lets a man demand his ex-wife revert to her maiden name if he believes she behaved “immorally” in the marriage, including by cheating.
“Are we integrating the country into the European Union, or into some terrible dystopia?”
Ukraine ratified the Istanbul Convention in June 2022, four months into the full-scale war. Article 48 of that convention prohibits any forced mediation in cases of violence against women.
Sovsun wrote on Facebook that the revised draft retains “the spirit” of patriarchal Soviet family law and asked: “Are we integrating the country into the European Union, or into some terrible dystopia?”
A door that didn’t open
For sexual minorities in Ukraine, the most cutting line is what isn’t there. The bill reaffirms “man and woman” as the marriage definition, echoing the Constitution. But the new text goes further. It ends the practice by which courts had been recognizing same-sex family relations, and makes any marriage automatically void if one partner legally changes their gender.
The new “actual family union” status—an alternative to marriage for cohabiting couples, and one of the bill’s main new categories—is defined as a woman and a man only.
A separate civil partnership law is being drafted. But “here there’s politics”—no certainty parliament will pass it.
Stefanchuk argued on Facebook that the bill preserves the existing legal status for sexual minorities and that civil-partnership questions can be handled in separate legislation.
Khomenko told RBC that Article 51 of the Ukrainian Constitution defines marriage as a union of a woman and a man, and constitutional amendments are forbidden under martial law.
Khomenko also acknowledged what Stefanchuk’s Facebook posts did not—that same-sex couples in Ukraine face concrete discrimination today, including problems with hospital visitation and the right to inherit property only “in the fourth queue,” as persons who shared a household. A separate civil partnership law is being drafted, he said. But “here there’s politics”—no certainty parliament will pass it.
Two such bills—Sovsun’s 9103 and 12252, urged by the European Parliament—have been waiting on the Legal Policy Committee for years.
More than 78 percent of Ukrainians say sexual minorities should have the same rights as everyone else.
Council of Europe standards have not waited. The Grand Chamber’s 2023 ruling in Fedotova v. Russia established a positive obligation under Article 8 of the Convention to provide some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples.
Public opinion has moved sharply. More than 78 percent of Ukrainians say sexual minorities should have the same rights as everyone else, according to an October 2025 KIIS survey commissioned by the Nash Svit center—up from 64 percent in 2022.
Civil partnerships drew 29.8 percent support against 35.1 percent opposed; the gap between supporters and opponents has shrunk from 18 points to five in three years. Among Ukrainians under 40, supporters already outnumber opponents.
“Even if something is unpopular, the government still has to do it and explain why.”
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The bill, on this question, runs counter to the trend.
“Some changes are made for human rights, and these are more often the rights of minorities, not the majority,” Yavorskyy said. “Even if something is unpopular, the government still has to do it and explain why.”
Forty thousand people the Soviet Union forgot
The bill carries forward a Soviet institution. Ukrainian disability-rights expert Olena Temchenko wrote for ZMINA that the new code “continues the Soviet tradition” of stripping legal capacity from people with mental disabilities through full guardianship.
Spain has abolished incapacitation entirely. The UK, Ireland, and France use supported decision-making.
Almost 40,000 Ukrainians were registered as incapacitated last year. Under the new code, an incapacitated person cannot challenge a guardian’s actions in court—only “an interested person” can, including the guardian’s relatives.
Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Ukraine ratified in 2009, requires the opposite: equal recognition of legal capacity, with support to exercise it. Spain has abolished incapacitation entirely. The UK, Ireland, and France use supported decision-making. Bill 15150, in Temchenko’s reading, “moves backward.”
The right to forget—and the right to reply
Buried in the privacy section is Article 328, which investigative journalists call “the right to forget”—a provision that lets a person demand search engines and state registers delete information not only if it is false, but also if it has “lost public interest.”
The analytical platform YouControl, which compiles dossiers on Ukrainian businesspeople and officials, called the article “verdict” for open data and financial monitoring. A neighboring provision grants legal entities a “digital image” status, extending privacy rights to companies. A former beneficiary of a sanctioned company, the platform warned, could demand a media outlet “deindex” his business history.
A separate provision allows a public official to compel a media outlet to publish his “response” to a critical investigation.
A separate provision, flagged by human rights advocates in Lviv, allows a public official to compel a media outlet to publish his “response” to a critical investigation—without having to prove the original information was inaccurate.
This is the second time in eight months that a similar architecture has surfaced. A media bill last September drew the same warning from Bihus.Info—the investigative outlet whose reporting on luxury estates built during wartime, and on the influence operation around businessman Timur Mindich, helped trigger the recent “Midas tapes” anti-corruption case.
Forests, rivers, and the registry
The property book reintroduces a medieval institution called посідання—actual control over property without legal title, with lawful basis presumed unless proven otherwise. A separate rule says only what’s entered in the public registry exists legally—and an entry cannot be canceled if there is a “good faith acquirer,” even if the original entry was illegal.
The result, in its current form, would let forests, rivers, and archaeological monuments be “legalized” through corrupt registrars.
The Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group has warned that the result, in its current form, would let forests, rivers, and archaeological monuments be “legalized” through corrupt registrars. The state would lose tools to recover land that was illegally privatized—a recurring problem since 1991, and one a country at war can afford less than ever.
On Svobody Avenue
By early May, civic mobilization against the bill had reached at least six cities. Suspilne tracked protests in Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Uzhhorod, Lviv, and Vinnytsia. In the capital on 5 May, a Women’s March drew around 2,000 demanding amendments before the second reading.
Hundreds gathered at the Taras Shevchenko monument on Svobody Avenue.
Their grievances were concrete: forced reconciliation in divorce, restrictions on reproductive rights, the heterosexual-only marriage definition, the right-to-forget for officials, and threats to recovering illegally appropriated lands. By the time of the Lviv rally on 7 May, civic organizations had prepared 95 pages of edits for the second reading and submitted them to parliament.
The Lviv rally was titled “Nothing for us without us”—a slogan from the disability-rights movement. It was co-organized by the Feminist Workshop and Insight, a Ukrainian LGBT-rights organization whose chair was teargassed in Lviv in April 2022, and whose community centers in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk have been attacked again as recently as last September.
Hundreds gathered at the Taras Shevchenko monument on Svobody Avenue. On the adjacent square, a considerably smaller “traditional values” rally was assembling.
Every attendee was searched individually before entry.
The police presence was unusually heavy. Officers parked vans around the square in front of the monument, blocking sightlines to the gathering from the avenue. Every attendee was searched individually before entry. Lviv civic protests have not historically required that procedure.
“The Civil Code shouldn’t help cover up corruption. It shouldn’t help hide crimes or the corrupt past of those in power,” Denys, 20, told Euromaidan Press at the rally. “The voice of the people, of journalists—it has to be heard.” On the police presence: “It’s psychological pressure, to scare the protesters. In no way does it contribute to safety.”
“I don’t want a judge deciding purely on his own desire what ‘good’ means to him.”
Eva, 19, came from Dnipro. “A law about rights is being passed in literally a few days,” she said. Civic organizations had submitted proposals at roundtables. “They just weren’t taken into account.” If the bill became law in its current form, “I don’t want a judge deciding purely on his own desire what ‘good’ means to him.”
The police presence made sense, she said: “Lviv is fairly religious, let’s say, and fairly far-right. Organizations like Centuria post very specific things about [LGBT people].”
She agreed to be quoted. She and her girlfriend declined to be photographed. Article 328 of the new Civil Code would let a person demand the deletion of public information about themselves once it has “lost public interest.”
For Eva and her girlfriend, the calculation about what to make public was already running in real time—in a public square, between police vans, in a country at war for the European future this bill may now compromise.
Kachka told RBC the Civil Code would be reworked for the second reading and “difficult discussions” lay ahead. More demonstrations are called for 17 May.
