The right to vote of the citizens who live on occupied territories on a permanent basis should be restricted until the territorial integrity is restored. “When you cannot ensure that these people inform themselves correctly and freely, that the campaigners and candidates go freely, communicate and meet with the voters there, when these people can be influenced by anti-state bodies, it is illogical to organize elections on that territory,” said Valeriu Pașa, project manager of WatchDog Community.
In IPN’s public debate “Does legal framework guarantee free and fair elections? Who guarantees correct implementation of legal framework?, the expert made reference to the experience of Ukraine and George and to the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters of the Venice Commission. The Code sets down criteria that explain what free and fair elections are. One of the criteria is the capacity of the state that organizes elections to ensure all the voters’ equal access to information, the media, advertising. “It’s very clear that if there is a territory on which these things cannot be ensure, elections cannot be organized there,” stated Valeriu Pașa.
According to him, the given recommendations of the Venice Commission should have been applied since when the Constitutional Court, on May 2, 2017, held that the Transnistrian region was territory under military occupation. “The elections do not mean only the election day. They are an electoral process with debates, campaigning. This is the sad reality as there are our citizens and they are not few in number there,” he stated.
As to the role of the judiciary in ensuring free and fair elections, Valeriu Pașa said this should be divided into two – the Constitutional Court and the common law courts. “We cannot speak about an upright, fully uncorrupt and uninfluenced judicial system, but there is no longer that terror to which the judges were subject when they were to either accept an illegal decision, taking possibly bribe for this, or to face persecution, problems and criminal cases.”
The current composition of the Constitutional Court showed that it can be equidistant when it took decisions that politically disadvantaged both the opposition and the power and, what’s more important, it showed that the classical situation of subordination to the government no longer exists.
The public debate “Does legal framework guarantee free and fair elections? Who guarantees correct implementation of legal framework?” was the 155th installment of the series “Developing political culture through public debates” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
