A bill has been registered in the Verkhovna Rada that clarifies the grounds for terminating an employment contract at the employer’s initiative. At first glance, this appears to be a minor technical clarification. In reality, it is a very telling amendment.

Currently, paragraph 41 of Part 1 of Article 41 of the Labor Code already allows an employer to terminate an employment contract in the event of an actual or potential conflict of interest, provided that the conflict is of a permanent nature and cannot be resolved by other means. And the Law “On Preventing Corruption” is generally based on the premise that termination is not the first, but the last resort: there are other mechanisms for resolving conflicts of interest available beforehand, and dismissal is permitted only in cases of a persistent conflict that cannot be resolved by other means.

Therefore, in essence, Draft Law No. 15162 does not introduce a new safeguard but simply codifies into the Labor Code what should already be in place according to the logic of anti-corruption legislation. If the conflict of interest has already ceased, dismissal on this ground appears not as a protection of the employer’s or the state’s interests, but as a sanction for a past situation. And that is a different legal matter altogether.

This is the bill’s strength. It enhances legal certainty and provides a simple safeguard against formal HR abuse. One cannot keep an “old” conflict of interest tucked away in a drawer as a backup pretext for dismissal. One cannot substitute the current state of affairs with an archived ground for dismissal. And one cannot pretend that a conflict exists automatically simply because it once existed.

It is telling that this approach is already supported by judicial precedent. The materials related to the bill and relevant publications explicitly cite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Case No. 346/5929/23: the court emphasized that dismissal due to a conflict of interest is possible only when that conflict is of a permanent nature, cannot be resolved, and has not ceased as of the date of dismissal. In other words, Parliament is not so much introducing a new legal concept here as it is attempting to codify an approach that is already well-established in practice.

But there is also a risk that should be honestly addressed. The new provision could lead to a simplistic, almost trivial interpretation: namely, that if there is no conflict of interest as of the date of the order, then there are no longer any issues regarding the employee. This is flawed logic. Resolving a conflict of interest does not automatically erase the potential consequences of prior decisions, actions, or inactions if they were already taken under the circumstances of such a conflict. The bill merely limits one specific ground for dismissal. It does not transform the elimination of a conflict of interest into a legal amnesty.

Another consequence is purely practical. Disputes will not decrease; they will simply become more precise. The focus of the legal dispute will shift to the facts: whether a conflict existed specifically on the date of termination, whether it was truly of a permanent nature, whether the employer attempted to resolve it through less drastic measures, or whether it all boiled down to a hasty order without sufficient evidence. For employers, this means one thing: poorly prepared terminations under Article 41, paragraph 41 of the Labor Code will have even less chance of holding up in court.

Bill No. 15162 is a small but sound amendment that removes the temptation for employers to terminate employment based on grounds that have already ceased to exist. And in labor law, this is important: grounds for termination must not only be formally stated but must also actually exist at the time the employee loses their job.