MP and president of “Levica” Dimitar Apasiev announced today at a press conference in the Parliament that at the request of the Speaker of the Parliament Talat Xhaferi, he submitted a written submission for procedural harmonization of the initially submitted proposal for calling a mandatory additional referendum, in connection with the French proposal.

He noted that a month after the submission of the initiative, i.e. after 35 days, on October 28, he finally received the notification from the speaker, although, he says, in a regular procedure it should last five days, and because he referred to inappropriate rules of procedure provisions.

There are a few funny things in Xhaferi’s reporting. The first joke that the speaker refers to is that he quotes completely wrong articles from the Rules of Procedure. He treats me as a member of parliament and addresses me according to Articles 135 and 136 as a proposer of a law, which is not the case in this case, because I am in the capacity of a natural person an authorized proposer as a submitter of civil initiatives. In such a case, completely different articles from the Rules of Procedure are relevant, namely articles 191 and 192. The next funny thing at which I honestly burst out laughing, says Apasiev, is that Xhaferi sends for correction a part that was not mentioned in the initiative, and after which he rejected the initiative for a referendum submitted by Hristijan Mickoski, leader of VMRO-DPMNE. And the last funny thing is that he quotes almost the entire Referendum Law by forgetting to quote the most important article, which is Article 24, which gives us as citizens the right to challenge decisions made by the Parliament. In the Law on other issues decided by the Parliament, Xhaferi says that those other issues cannot be conclusions. And how can they be conclusions, because precisely under the term other questions come the conclusions, explains Apasiev.

Apasiev adds that Xhaferi interprets that the conclusion is the position of the Parliament, which, as he assesses, is another legal error by his legal consultants, because the position of the Parliament according to the Rules of Procedure is expressed by a declaration and not by a conclusion. As a summary administrative act, he is not competent to make such a conclusion himself, that is, according to the law, he must obtain a prior opinion from two-parent working bodies. It is the Legislative-Legal Commission and the Commission for Political System and Inter-Community Relations, and he does not do that, that is, he is not competent because the conclusion is brought by the plenum, not the speaker.

Asked what would happen if Xhaferi rejected the initiative, the leader of Levica said that he would wait for the answer, and then pointed out that they have legal and political mechanisms at their disposal.