The Constitutional Court on February 25 declared unconstitutional the formulation “whose number cannot be lower than 4,000” from the law on political parties. This means the parties will no longer need to present a list of 4,000 members for being registered officially, IPN reports.

The part of the law saying that when a party is constituted, its members should live in at least half of the territorial-administrative units of the second level in the Republic of Moldova, but not fewer than 120 members in each of the given territorial-administrative units was also declared unconstitutional.

Under the CC judgment, the numeric and territorial representation criteria create an obstacle that is hard to be overcome when registering a party. The high ceiling excessively limits the benefit of freedom of association in political parties.

If Parliament does not review the law on political parties in accordance with the reasons stated in the judgment until July 31, the Public Services Agency will make sure that the parties are registered according to the conditions specified by the law, except for the provisions that were declared unconstitutional.

The Constitutional Court passed the judgment after examining a requisition filed by a group that submitted a number of applications to have the Party “For People, Nature and Animals’” registered. Their last application was rejected for the reason that the numeric and territorial representation criteria for registering political parties weren’t met.