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Civil society organizations that made a public call on February 2 reiterated their demand to Parliament to create a working group for amending the Election Code and related legislation so as to exclude the legislative shortcomings signaled by national and international election observation missions that worked in Moldova in 2014-2016. The NGOs also argue against the replacement of the electoral system.

In a news conference at IPN, Pavel Postica, programs director at “Promo-LEX” Association, said the electoral legislation concerning the work of electoral bodies, party and election campaign funding, performance of the mass media in election campaigns, use of administrative resources, voter corruption and involvement of religious organizations in the election campaign should be amended.

“On February 2, we called on Parliament to draw up a clear working program and to remove the mentioned deficiencies,” stated Pavel Postica.

The civil society organizations demand that the working group should include representatives of parliamentary parties, extra-parliamentary parties, representatives of the signatory organizations and electoral experts. The signatories are ready to take part in the meetings of the working group if this does not deal with the replacement of the electoral system. Otherwise, they will boycott the activity of the working group and will publicly state their position.

On February 2, 2017, 18 nongovernmental organizations demanded that Parliament should set up a working group to amend the Election Code and related legislation. The signatories requested the legislature to constitute a working group to draft bills to amend the Election Code and related legislation in February-March, to publicly discuss the bills in April-May and to have these appraised by international organizations, namely the Venice Commission and OSCE/ODIHR, in May-July and to adopt the amendments in September-October.

Among the signatories are: the Association “Promo-LEX”, East Europe Foundation, the Institute for European Politics and Reforms, the Journalistic Investigations Center, the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, the Association for Participatory Democracy, Transparency International – Moldova, the Women’s Association for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Development, the Association of Independent Press, the Institute for Public Policy, and the Foundation for Development of the Republic of Moldova, and CReDO.

On March 6, the president of the Democratic Party Vlad Plahotniuc presented an initiative aimed at replacing the party-list proportional representation system with the uninominal voting system.

Source: ipn.md