The Great National Assembly Council considers that the decision by the Central Election Commission (CEC) to reject the initiative group’s proposal to hold a constitutional referendum is illegal, unconstitutional and anti-people. In a news conference at IPN, members of the Council said they will challenge the CEC’s decision in the national courts of law. These invited the entire population of Moldova to a large-scale protest that will be mounted in the Great National Assembly Square in Chisinau on April 24.
The chairman of the political party “Platform Dignity and Truth” Andrei Nastase, who is also the leader of the initiative group, said that by the decision to reject the initiative to hold a referendum, the CEC ignored the letter and spirit of the law by political order. “The fact that the CEC members tried to hide behind the Constitution Court’s correspondence with politicians Filat and Dodon and behind the hallucinating and criminal interpretations of the Constitution, which was flouted in time by all the governments, is a conclusive example of this,” he stated.
Nastase noted that they will dispute the CEC’s decision in the national courts of law because from legal viewpoint this is the only way of reaching an international court.
Council member Alexandru Slusari said the arguments provided by the CEC for rejecting the initiative group’s proposal are absurd. As the government fulfilled none of the demands formulated by the protesters and impoverishes the people with taxes, the protests remain the only method of opposing the regime.
In another development, Council member Vasile Nastase said the authorities cannot ask for 20,000 signatures from each of the 18 territorial-administrative units for initiating a referendum when the country’s population almost halved. If the Constitution’s provisions of 2000 were restored, the presidential elections should be held within three months. At least the first round of the presidential elections should be held on June 23.
“We want to make the government, together with the development partners and the population of Moldova, to set the early parliamentary elections simultaneously with the presidential elections, in accordance with the Constitution. These elections should also include the constitutional referendum on the four matters on which the over 400,000 Moldovan citizens pronounced, namely: to allow the people to choose the Head of State and to dismiss the Head of State, to reduce the number of MPs, and to limit the parliamentary immunity,” stated Vasile Nastase.
On March 30, the CEC rejected the proposal of the initiative group set up by the Platform “Dignity and Truth” to hold a constitutional referendum by a majority of votes. The Commission’s president Iurie Ciocan argued that the signatures collected by the group members do not meet the validity conditions.
