MANS today filed to the Constitutional Court 148 complaints on so far received decisions by the State Election Commission by which decisions of the Capital’s Election Commission are confirmed on rejecting complaints to election irregularities recorded during the observation of the local elections on May 25th this year.
Filed appeals relate to the first set of 916 complaints that MANS filed to the Election Commission on behalf of three parties, and it rejected them, which confirmed and the SEC. MANS submitted to the competent institutions over 2500 complaints on the election irregularities that happened on the local elections in Podgorica.
The State Election Commission did not address the essence of the complaints but rather automatically and without any legal basis unilaterally rejected our complaints, previously not dealing with the facts, no reviewing official records, or collecting information form the members of the electoral board or MANS’s observers.
The decisions made that way were only motivated by political interest of the ruling party in order to more effectively hide the number of electoral irregularities and this is clearly presented in the way how the SEC and Capital’s Election Commission rejected our complaints.
We expect today to receive other decisions for the rest of complaints which continue the case of “processing’ irregularities, but actually one shamelessly created illusion that the system works, and that with the speed of two complaints per minute. Regardless, MANS will persist in the legal procedures and bring to the end all started procedures in order to finally have a very concrete democratic proves and legal capacity and the SEC and the Capital’s Election Commission.
The previous work of these institutions showed that the Law on the Election of the Members of the Parliament and Councilors has serious drawbacks and do not provide not even minimum conditions for holding free and fair elections, and that the SEC and the Capital Election Commission are deeply politicized, to the extend that they do not refrain of rejecting totally obvious and indisputable election irregularities.
When in comes to the Constitutional Court, this institution showed that the political pressure on it can give concrete results, despite the fact that it is obligated to work and judge by the Constitution and laws of this country. Every other except a positive response on our appeals would be an additional confirmation that this institution is not the a court of citizens but rather a court of one political party. This is because for a reason that MANS today filed appeals that relate to specific and documented electoral irregularities, which no one so far disputed or denied, but also on the catastrophic errors that the Capital’s Election Commission and the SEC did during extremely fast rejection of our complaints.
Despite the impossibility of their legal processing because of general politicization of the competent institutions, irregularities that MANS’s observers recorded on May 25 th continue to witness to what extend the electoral process in Montenegro is trapped in corruption, and institutions powerless to resist the brutal political pressure.
MANS
