news agency Infotag

CONSTITUTIONAL COURT WILL ADOPT ITS RESOLUTION ON REFERENDUM RESULTS WITHOUT WAITING FOR PARLIAMENT’S DECISION – CC CHAIRMAN

29.07.2010

The Constitutional Court Resolution on recognizing the results of September 5 referendum [on amending the presidential election procedure] shall not require an approval by parliament, Court Chairman Dumitru Pulbere stated on the Prime television channel on Wednesday night.   

Earlier this month, Moldova’s Acting President Mihai Ghimpu, a lawyer by his university education, maintained that upon the announcement of referendum results and their recognition as valid by the Constitutional Court, the Parliament will be supposed to fix the referendum outcome with its official decision.    

Dumitru Pulbere explained:  upon referendum voting completion, the Central Election Commission will draw up the voting results and send them and accompanying documents to the Constitutional Court, which will approve them, and from that very moment the amended Article 78 in the Constitution shall come into effect – “without whatever parliamentary procedures”.     

Pulbere said that the wording and the content of the amended Article 78 shall be precisely the way they have been formulated in the bill proposed by the group of parliamentarians – the initiative authors.   

The CC Chairman announced also that the answer to the question about whether ex-president Vladimir Voronin has the right to stand for presidency once again (this time by force of a direct vote by the nation) shall be given on August 3, when the Constitutional Court will convene for its plenary meeting and will provide its interpretation of Article 80 in the Constitution, which, in its present-day shape, prohibits a person to hold the presidential post for more than 2 tenures in a row. 

The Court will have to clarify and eliminate the main stumbling block in this question, namely will have to decide whether it is possible to regard the current temporary office of Mihai Ghimpu’s as a full-fledged presidential mandate.  

Pulbere said he has no idea why the request to provide interpretation of this Article came to the Constitutional Court not from the Communist Party but from the governing Alliance for European Integration, namely from MP Ion Plesca.  

Commenting the CC judgment on recognizing as non-constitutional the acting president’s Decree on declaring June 28, 1940 as a Day of Soviet occupation and Mihai Ghimpu’s argument that the notion of “Soviet occupation regime” is contained in the Moldova Independence Declaration, Dumitru Pulbere reminded that the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova was adopted in 1994 – three years after the Independence.   

“In the 1994 Constitution, we cannot find such provisions from the Independence Declaration. Meanwhile, the CC judgment in question was based exclusively on the nation’s Main Law. Presently, not a single law in Moldova, not only its Constitution, contains the notion of “Soviet occupation regime””.