The provision was introduced in the Constitution during the 2004 Constitutional Amendments on December 8, 2004. During the 2006 Ukrainian political crisis by PresidentViktor Yushchenko applied the provision while dissolving the parliament in April 2007 after members of the oppositioncrossed party lines to join the Alliance of National Unity to undermine his authority and reach a 300-MP constitutional majority. On October 1, 2010 the Constitutional Court of Ukraine overturned the 2004 Constitutional Amendments, considering them unconstitutional. Several individual joined other factions already on October 5, 2010. But the Verkhovna Rada canceled the law's provision after amending the regulations of its activities on October 8, 2010; since then only 15 or more deputies can form a parliamentary faction, a lawmaker can join only one faction and deputies who are expelled from factions or decide to leave them become individual lawmakers; individual deputies are allowed to unite into parliamentary groups of people's deputies then again at least 15 deputies are required for the formation of such groups.
2014 reinstatement
On 21 February 2014 the parliament passed a law that reinstated the December 8, 2004 amendments of the constitution. This was passed under simplified procedure without any decision of the relevant committee and was passed in the first and the second reading in one voting by 386 deputies. The law was approved by 140 MPs of the Party of Regions, 89 MPs of Batkivshchyna, 40 MPs of UDAR, 32 of the Communist Party, and 50 independent lawmakers. Petro Poroshenko Bloc MPs Mykola Tomenko and Yehor Firsov parliamentary mandates were terminated by the provision in March 2016. In practice the Imperative mandate causes the deprivation of the mandate of deputies who leave their faction by their own initiative while deputies who are removed from their faction become an independent MP. In June 2020, after parliament had refused his request to release him from parliament, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk left his party's faction and he and his party terminated his parliamentary mandate through the imperative mandate.
Criticism
The Imperative mandate provisions had been the subject of criticism by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as being undemocratic till its end. In the Assembly's 2007 report on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - Resolution 1549 Functioning of democratic institutions in Ukraine it wrote:
