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REJECTION OF CONSTITUTION AMENDMENT INITIATIVE WILL PLAY AGAINST CITIZENRY, NOT AGAINST LDPM – FILAT
Infotag’s interview with Liberal Democratic Party leader MP Vladimir Filat.
Question: Several months ago, the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova set up a group that is currently raising citizens’ signatures for holding a nation-wide referendum for revising essential clauses in the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova in order to return to a nation-wide election of president and to introduce a mixed system of parliament election, when a half of deputies are elected by party lists and the other half – from single-mandate constituencies. So, how is the signature raising going?
Answer: The work is approaching completion because by this June 23 we are supposed to submit signature lists to the Central Election Commission (CEC). My party comrades are checking the signatures in the Primarias [executive organs] of those populated areas where the signatures were obtained, as per the legislation in force. In some localities, we come across difficulties. Some local mayors use various pretexts to avoid certifying the signature lists. Other mayors refuse even to accept lists. And some avoid meeting with the initiative group representatives. It is quite symptomatic that these categories of mayors represent the ruling Moldovan Communist Party. A bright example to this is the mainland Moldova’s second largest city – Balti, headed by Communist Mayor Vasile Panciuc. If he does not revise his attitude and keeps on refusing to attest the nearly 10 thousand signatures raised in the city, then we may come to face the risk of short-receiving the necessary minimum of 200 thousand signatures, i.e. the entire campaign may fail.
Q: What are you doing to overcome the problem?
A: We scrutinize the reasons of each concrete incident of that kind. Occasionally, CEC representatives join this work, though I presume they could act more energetically to use their plenary powers in full. As for Balti, I am going to visit the city and, as a parliament deputy, will demand a meeting with Mayor Panciuc to clarify things.
A should admit it is fairly hard to achieve a success, when the legislation abounds in bottlenecks and inconsistencies. For instance, the law reads that signature collectors must have the signatures certified by mayors, but the same law does not compel the mayors to accept the signatures from the initiative group. This discrepancy in the legislation generates certain problems when it comes to seeking justice in the court.
Q: The CEC has approved regulations stipulating a technique of acceptance and checking of raised signatures, and has even set up 8 working groups for this work. Are you satisfied with how the Commission reacted to the LDPM-initiated campaign?
A: No, so far the regulations read that the working groups may send to the Ministry of Justice for examination the signatures whose authenticity is doubted by the groups. The LDPM already sent to the Ministry of Justice the lists of party members, which was necessary to do to register the party officially. I guess everybody knows what followed: our party members are now being subjected to exhaustive interrogations accompanied with overt violation of their basic rights only because they dare belong to the LDPM and dare confirm this. Now the least thing I would like to see is that over 200 thousand Moldovans, who put their signatures in favor of the Constitution amending, be subjected to interrogations and intimidation. We stand for canceling these provisions in the regulations, and we hope the CEC will make it. If not, the LDPM National Council will decide how to act next.
Q: You said your activists had already raised over 200 thousand signatures. But last week CEC Secretary Iurie Ciocan stated that minimum 340 thousand are needed for amending the Constitution. Could you comment, please?
A: I regard Mr. Ciocan’s statement as a jest of malevolence and as one pursuing the purpose of misleading the people engaged in the signature raising work. The CEC Secretary mentioned only a part of the legal norm. Article 141 in the Constitution, which he mentioned, stipulates that 200 thousand signatures need to be provided for holding a referendum to amend the Constitution. This is the basic figure to proceed from. The Article further says that, really, the citizens wishing a Constitution amendment must represent minimum a half of the country’s administrative-territorial units of the second level, and minimum 20 thousand signatures have to be raised in each such unit. By the way, an elementary arithmetic calculation, which Mr. Ciocan mentioned, should show that the figure must actually be 360 thousand, not 340 thousand signature, as he stated. However, this very second part of the Article has been the fault of the Communists-dominated Parliament, which simply forgot to revise the arithmetic when Moldova returned to smaller-size raions [now numbering 34] instead of previous larger-size judets [11]. As a matter of fact, the provision concerning the 20,000-signature minimum is actually non-functional and even ridiculous because some Moldovan raions are quite small and they do not even have twenty thousand residents eligible to vote.
I did hope that these legislation irregularities would be analyzed and commented by the Constitutional Court when it would be considering the signature lists and the CEC’s decision on them. Now I deeply regret that events were projected in such an expert way that the public has been so purposefully misled.
Q: What do you think are the chances that your campaign may end in a failure?
A: To our mind, this campaign will in no way be a failure, no matter the signature raising success. We have stated from its very beginning that we shall do our job and shall not change our stance. Our civil duty is to raise signatures to prove that the Moldovan society shares our ideas. The last word in this campaign will be after officials. But we would like to tell them that a possible declination of the LDPM initiative will be a decision against the Moldovan citizens, not against the Liberal Democratic Party. So the decision-makers must assume the responsibility for their decision.
Infotag: Thank you very much for your interview, Mr. Filat.
