MANS today addressed the Collegium of the President of the Parliament with a request that this body obligates the Legislative Committee of the Parliament to make an official consolidated text of the Law on Financing of Political Parties, having in mind that the campaign for the elections in Herceg Novi already started and that the participants of the campaign do not have official information about what current version of the law allows and what behaviors are prohibited.
In fact, the Constitutional Court on May 30th 2014, acting on the initiative of five members of the Democratic Party of Socialists, the Bosniak Party, and Croatian Civil Initiative repealed a significant numbers of provisions of the Law on Financing Political Parties. So far, no institution prepared official cleared version of the text of the Law, nor based on the Montenegrin legal system there is an institution that suppose to do that as its official duty.
Meanwhile, the President of Montenegro has announced local elections in Herceg Novi, and no participant in the electoral process, as well as institutions responsible for the implementation of elections and control of the whole process, do not know what their true rights are and what their obligations are based on the provisions of the Law on Financing Political Parties that apply after the judgment of the Constitutional Court.
For example, political parties do not have accurate information about what is allowed in the campaign and what behaviors are still prohibited, the State Election Commission which controls application of the Law does not have precise information what kind of violations of that Law should prosecute and in which way, while state and local bodies do not have information about what kind of limits of misuse of public resources during election campaign from the past are still valid and which were repealed.
For example, institutions should know whether the Constitutional Court repealed only provisions in recent amendments of the Law on Financing Political Parties, which limit employment in public sector during the campaign, or also those, rigid restrictions, which were in force prior to that, proposed by the Government of Montenegro, for which voted members of the Parliament from the parties who now submitted initiative to the Constitutional Court. It is similar and with other restrictions that constituted, on a suggestion of the Government, prior version of the law, which now after the decision of the Constitutional Court representatives of the party in power hypocritically challenge, even though they themselves voted for them.
It is especially important to note that most of the norms from the Law on Financing Political Parties are “covered” and with misdemeanor provisions, so therefore it is essential that all participants in the electoral process and those who are directly and indirectly touched by the law exactly know what are they right and obligations, based on the current Law.
Therefore, MANS requested from the Collegium to obligate the Legislative Committee of the Montenegrin Parliament, in accordance with Article 39 of the Rules of the Parliament, to make official cleared version of the Law on Financing Political Parties and after completing it to deliver it to all subjects recognized by the Law on Financing Political Parties, so they can now exactly what norms to use and in which way during the campaign for the local elections in Herceg Novi.
From the Collegium we also requested and to ensure that the official cleared version of the Law on Political Parties is published on the website of the Parliament in order to be available to the public and to all other interested subjects.
We want to believe that the Collegium will in urgent procedure meet our initiative and it will make a decision on the next session to formally obligate the Legislative Committee to draft mentioned text of the law, in order all participants in the electoral process to know their rights and obligations. In this way the Collegium will lower the possibility of violations of the law due to the fact that the parties and institutions do not know what kind of provisions of the Law they are obligated to apply and in which way, and especially those violations that can be done deliberately and later can be justified by the fact that the new official version of the law does not exist, so the institutions did not know what provisions exactly they were obligated to apply.
Vuk Maras
Director of Monitoring Program
