MANS welcomes today’s decision of the majority members of the Committee for Political System, Judiciary who voted for the establishment of the Temporary Board which would control the implementation of the election laws.
We believe that to Montenegro such a working body is urgently needed, in order to establish an electoral system in which the public will have confidence, especially given the fact that the last elections were abounded by numerous, serious irregularities and violations of voting rights and election procedures that our observers recorded.
The last elections are at the same time and the first elections in Montenegro where finally were documented a huge number of serious irregularities on the election day, for which there are new evidence that they occurred, and on which basis were filed over 2,500 complaints to the Electoral Commission and the Constitutional Court. However, these institutions responsible for the implementation of election laws did not at any moment address the substance of the irregularities, but they did, using force actually by using the majority of them that the party in power has, make political decisions that are contrary to the law.
Beside the irregularities on election day, MANS registered and serious irregularities during the election campaign, where we proved and documented a huge number of cases of vote buying by using state money through social security payments, loans, public sector employment etc., and the cases of the buying of ID cards, irregularities in the electoral roll and numerous other electoral mechanisms.
In this regard, it is clear why only DPS, as the party that controls all the key levers of power in this country for the last 25 years, today voted against the establishment of the Temporary Board which would control the implementation of the election laws. In this party, whose officials within the affair “Snapshot” to all citizens of Montenegro explained the way they brake the laws of this country in order to buy votes and influence the election results, are aware that the establishment of the Temporary Board would be additional mechanism to establish greater legality of the electoral process and thereby prevent electoral abuses that were largely used during previous election cycle.
We believe that the Temporary Board should be urgently established, in order to immediately begin to address the most important questions that would cast a light on the legality of the last elections and other elections before the last ones. Thus this body would need to find, as soon as possible, an adequate response to the shortcomings in the existing regulations which define the electoral process, as well as on the politicized work of the bodies for the implementation of the elections, which ignore the law and the public interest, but are governed by the interests of the party in power from which the majority of their members come.
Because of that MANS will, regardless of all pressures that the state apparatus tries to make on us, respond to the invitation of this parliamentary working body when is formed, to provide it with all information, documentation, and evidence that we have collected relating violations that have occurred during the electoral process, both in the pre-election period and on election day.
MANS
