MANS invites members of the Legislative Committee of the Parliament to urgently consider and adopt the response to the Constitutional Court that have been prepared by MANS and Positive Montenegro, which clearly argues and proves that the proposal to review the constitutionality of 18 articles of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Financing Political Parties submitted by the members of DPS, Bosniak party, and the Croatian Civil Initiative is entirely unfounded.
The Constitutional Court on March 5th submitted a proposal to the Parliament that members of DPS, BP, ans CCI seek to abolish 18 articles of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties, actually the entire law to make pointless in order to make the party in power able once again to misuse public resources and public powers for vote buying of Montenegrin citizens, and for the influence on their electoral will. The Constitutional Court under this Act left to the Parliament period of 30 days to respond, and the deadline expires on April 3rd 2014.
According to the procedure that is defined by the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, the Legislative Committee must have an opinion on the proposal which was submitted to the Constitutional Court by the members of DPS, BP, and CCI, and delivers to the Parliament a proposal response that is required to be submitted to the Constitutional Court.
To finish the procedure as soon as possible and to do it in a time limit of 30 days in which Parliament must submit a response to the Constitutional Court, MANS in cooperation with the Positive Montenegro, which was the proposer of the amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties, made the proposal response for the Constitutional Court.
In that document the arguments are put forward which indicate that the initiative by DPS, BP, and CCI is completely unfounded, it was shown how meaningless the statements are that the members of the ruling party often refer to, but also it is pointed out that according to the practice of the Constitutional Court so far there is no basis to support the initiative of the ruling party. Also, in the document we emphasized that the recently adopted amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties are basis to restore trust in the electoral process and mechanism that prevents further abuse of state resources and public power, which is, number one, domestic and as well foreign policy priority of Montenegro.
Clearly, the adoption of the amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties was a key demand of the EU placed in front of our state to continue the process of European integration, in order to end electoral manipulations, on which MANS indicates since the job beginning of Working Group for building confidence in the electoral process. That is just one of many reasons why this law must continue to be applied in full as it was adopted, by a majority vote of the members of the Parliament.
We believe that missing the deadline and lack of response by the Parliament to this initiative of the ruling party could be understood as an agreement of the Parliament with that initiative, which could have disastrous consequences and could lead to the abolition of the recently adopted amendments to the Law on Financing of Political Parties.
In order to prevent the Parliament to miss the deadline and to fail to submit the response to the Constitutional Court to a rather meaningless initiative submitted by the members of the ruling party, we invite the Legislative Committee to urgently convene a meeting to review the document drafted by MANS and Positive Montenegro, and to forward it to the Parliament for adoption.
Otherwise, with each giving chance to the Constitutional Court to abolish a provision of the Law on Financing Political Parties would lead to the fact that the next elections in Montenegro are repeated scenario from Berane in which the party in power brutally and with no consequences, even on the election day, buys votes from citizens, influences their free will, and thus in that way brings all participants in the electoral process in an unequal position.
MANS
