ZAGREB, February 8, 2019 - The Public Administration Ministry commission, set up to verify signatures collected by two civil society groups for their referendum initiatives, has destroyed the checklists with all invalid signatures, Robert Podolnjak of the opposition MOST party said at a meeting of the parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, Rules of Procedure and Political System on Friday.
After finding at its previous meeting that conditions for calling the two referendums had not been met, the Committee was to vote on Podoljnak's proposal that a new, independent commission should check the list with 40,000 signatures that have been declared invalid.
The civil society group The Truth about the Istanbul Convention had launched a signature gathering campaign for a referendum to reverse the ratification of the Istanbul Convention by Parliament, while the People Decide initiative had called for a referendum to change the electoral system. The Public Administration Ministry found that neither group had gathered enough signatures for their referendum petitions as many of the signatures were declared invalid.
Podolnjak said he had received information that the Ministry had destroyed all the checklists with invalid signatures, to which Peđa Grbin of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP) said that, if the information was true, the Ministry's move was unacceptable.
Grbin said it would be best to postpone the vote and check the correctness of Podolnjak's statement with the Ministry. Since their proposals were rejected, Podolnjak and Grbin walked out of the meeting and broke the quorum.
"I have received a record of a meeting where the civil initiative The People Decide asked the Public Administration Ministry for access to the checklists of all invalid signatures. They were not able to see the lists because a representative of the Ministry said they had been destroyed. That means that the key proof of over 40,000 invalid signatures no longer exists. The Ministry destroyed it before Parliament could decide on the petition for calling a referendum," Podolnjak told the press after the Committee meeting.
He said that before Parliament took any decisions, he would request submission of the checklists to Parliament, and if the government and the Ministry failed to do that, it would mean that they had irreversibly destroyed the evidence.
"In that case it would be a huge scandal which should not have happened, but it would show the evident intention to obstruct the calling of a referendum. The lists were destroyed by the Public Administration Ministry, its representative on that commission said so. State Secretary Nekić was also present at the meeting of the Committee on the Constitution and he did not deny this information," Podolnjak said.
The Committee chairman, Željko Reiner of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), said that according to his information none of the relevant documents had been destroyed and anyone wishing to check their signature could do so. "We accepted the proposal put forward by Mr Grbin to request an official opinion from the Public Administration Ministry and I expect that it will respond very quickly," Reiner said.
The Public Administration Ministry on Friday responded to the claim by MOST MP Robert Podolnjak that checklists with invalid signatures collected for two civil society referendum initiatives had been destroyed, stating that the checklists were a technical aid whose purpose ceased to exist once the report on the verification of the number and authenticity of voters' signatures was compiled.
The Ministry said that all the data from the signature lists were entered into an application, adding that the checklists were working material for the commission and contained a list of invalid signatures that were entered between the commission's meetings and were handed over successively to make the verification process quicker and more thorough.
The checklists indicated the position of the invalid signature in the box, volume, page and line and the reason for its invalidity. The commission reviewed the checklists and determined whether or not any of the invalid signatures should subsequently be included.
As the checklists contained personal data that was also saved in the application, keeping them in paper form after the cessation of their purpose would have presented an unnecessary risk of someone getting a hold of those lists with the details of signatories, which is why they were destroyed after their purpose ceased to exist, the Ministry said in its explanation.
The Ministry also enclosed the report on the verification of voters' signatures that were declared invalid. The report says that the Public Administration Ministry had allowed representatives of the civil initiatives to inspect all the signatures that were declared invalid, while observing personal data protection rules.
More news on the referendum initiatives can be found in the Politics section.
