The Parliament decision of December 3, 2020 by which the numerical and nominal composition of the Parliament’s Standing Bureau was modified was declared unconstitutional. The Constitutional Court on July 27 pronounced following a challenge filed by PPPDA MPs to the decision adopted by the then parliamentary majority consisting of the MPs of the Party of Socialists and the Platform “For Moldova”, which included the MPs of the Shor Party, IPN reports.
Dinu Plîngău and Maria Ciobanu, who served as MPs when they submitted the challenge, weren’t present at the Court’s meeting. In their challenge, they say that the parliamentary majority, abusing its dominant position in Parliament, violated the Parliament’s Regulations. In the absence of a draft decision, right during the planetary sitting, the Socialist group and Shor Party’s group agreed to modify the nominal composition of the Parliament’s Standing Bureau. The agenda of the December 3, 2020 sitting didn’t include such a subject. It wasn’t clear what was put to the vote as there was no draft and because the conditions were tense amid the opposition’s protests “against the majority’s abuses”.
As a result of deliberations, the Court declared the December 3 decision unconstitutional. The communication of bills and decisions to the MPs is a stage by which the parliamentary lawmaking procedures are initiated, CC president Domnica Manole stated in a press briefing.
“To make sure the MPs can familiarizer themselves with the content of bills and draft Parliament decision, the lawmakers should be offered a reasonable period of time for analyzing them and, respectively, for forming an opinion about the examined subject. In this case, the challenged draft decision was registered with the Parliament’s secretariat on December 3, 2020. The same day, the bill was included in the additional agenda of the plenary sitting and was adopted by the parliamentary majority. At the Court’s request, Parliament didn’t prove that the given draft decision was communicate to the MPs, in particular to the authors of the challenge, before it was put to the vote,” stated Domnica Manole.
The decision is definitive, cannot be disputed, takes effect when it is adopted and is published in the Official Gazette.
