ZAGREB, April 28, 2019 - The turnout on the first day of the union campaign for a referendum against the planned pension reform was more than good in Zagreb while it was slightly poorer only in eastern Slavonia due to bad weather, union leader Krešimir Sever of the union initiative "67 is too much" said on Saturday.

"We still don't have concrete figures, but judging by reports on the ground, the turnout is more than good," Sever told Hina, expressing confidence that in the next two weeks unions would manage to collect more than 373,568 signatures, which is how many need to be collected for a referendum on restoring the retirement age to 65 years.

Around 300 stalls at 200 locations across the country will be open from today until May 11, for citizens to give their signatures for a referendum against changes to the Pension Insurance Act.

Sever said the sentiments among citizens were more than favourable and that union leaders were more than satisfied.

He claimed that a TV add commissioned by the Labour and Pension System Ministry, which said that a possible success of the referendum would cost the state budget 45 billion kuna, was an additional motive for citizens to want to sign the referendum petition.

"People see through the minister's messages and are commenting on them as they sign the referendum petition. That attempt to scare them was one of the motives for them to sign the referendum petition," said Sever.

By saying that a possible success of the referendum will cost the budget 45 billion kuna and result in a decrease in pensions, the ministry is trying to deceive citizens because in its calculations it takes into account only those parameters that are in the government's favour, said Sever.

He said that according to Eurostat projections, 12 European countries, including Croatia, would have a slight decrease in the share of the pension cost in GDP in the coming decades.

Sever also cited European Commission projections showing that in 2040 Croatia would have a share of the pension cost in GDP of 8.3% (as against the current share of 10.3%) and that in 2070 that share would be 6.8%.

Three union federations early on Saturday morning started collecting signatures for a referendum on planned changes to the Pension Insurance Act to prevent the raising of the retirement age to 67.

The signature collection campaign, to last until May 11, was organised by the NHS, SSSH and MHS union federations.

The union federations want the government to restore the retirement age to 65, to set the age for early retirement at 60, and to reduce penalties for early retirement from 0.3% to 0.2% per month of early retirement.

More referendum news can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, April 26, 2019 - Three trade union federations will start collecting signatures for their retirement referendum petition at Friday midnight and as many as 300 movable stands will be set up throughout Croatia in the next two weeks for that purpose.

One of union activists, Robert Brozd, on Friday morning called on the Croatians to give their signatures for this initiative.

An estimated 385,000 signatures will be needed for the petition to be valid.

The three union federations – NHS, SSSH, and MATICA (Association of Croatian Trade Unions) – have launched their "67 is too much" campaign to call the referendum which would bring back the full retirement age to 65 as it was prior to the pension reform. The signature collection campaign will run from April 27 to May 11.

The initiative proposes that an insured person be entitled to old age pension upon reaching 65 years of age and having completed 15 years of qualifying periods and to early age pension with 60 years of age and 35 years of qualifying periods, reducing penalisation for early retirement from 0.3% to 0.2%, and delaying the equation of the required pension age for men and women.

Asked by reporters why they had not launched this initiative when the Social Democratic Party (SDP) proposed the raising the statutory pension age, unionist Ana Miličević Pezelj said that they had not had all the relevant data which they possessed now and that they had expected an improvement of technological and working conditions in the transitional period, which was why the retirement age in Western countries was higher than in Croatia.

"We don't have conditions to raise the retirement age," she added.

The Archdiocese of Zagreb on Thursday stated that it was not able to give permission to three union federations to collect signatures for their retirement referendum petition at the premises owned by this Catholic archdiocese, underlining that it does not take sides with anybody in this case.

Explaining its refusal to permit unionists to collect signatures outside its churches and other buildings it owns, the Archdiocese says that in the processes aimed at achieving goals through referenda, the Church makes its premises available to civic initiatives that have no other possibilities for accomplishment of the values which they and the Church advocate.

On the other hand, trade unions can act within the regulated relations within the political life in Croatia and can in "a regular way and with certain financial support" achieve their objectives, the Archdiocese says.

The archdiocese says that the topic of pension system is definitely extremely important for the Croatian society and believes that the matter should be looked at from a broader framework than the issue of statutory pension age.

More referendum news can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, April 26, 2019 - The Archdiocese of Zagreb on Thursday stated that it was not able to give permission to three union federations to collect signatures for their retirement referendum petition at the premises owned by this Catholic archdiocese, underlining that it does not take sides with anybody in this case.

Explaining its refusal to permit unionists to collect signatures outside its churches and other buildings it owns, the Archdiocese says that in the processes aimed at achieving goals through referenda, the Church makes its premises available to civic initiatives that have no other possibilities for accomplishment of the values which they and the Church advocate.

On the other hand, trade unions can act within the regulated relations within the political life in Croatia and can in "a regular way and with certain financial support" achieve their objectives, the Archdiocese says.

The archdiocese says that the topic of pension system is definitely extremely important for the Croatian society and believes that this matter should be looked at from a broader framework than the issue of statutory pension age.

The three union federations have launched their "67 is too much" campaign to call a referendum which would bring back the full retirement age to 65 as it was prior to the pension reform. The signature collection campaign will run from April 27 to May 11.

The initiative proposes that an insured person be entitled to old age pension upon reaching 65 years of age and having completed 15 years of qualifying periods and to early age pension with 60 years of age and 35 years of qualifying periods, reducing penalisation for early retirement from 0.3% to 0.2%, and delaying the equation of the required pension age for men and women.

More news about referendums can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, April 16, 2019 - Preparations for a signature gathering campaign by the referendum initiative "67 is too much" are nearing completion and everything will be ready for the launch of the campaign on April 27, leaders of three trade union federations which are organising the campaign told a press conference in Zagreb on Tuesday.

The unions called on the public to support their petition to reinstate the retirement age of 65, reduce penalties for early retirement, prevent the possibility of increasing the qualifying age for an old-age pension to 61, and extend the transition period for equalising the retirement conditions for women and men.

Only one percent of workers take an early retirement of their own free will, 20 percent retire early because of ill health, while most are "disposed of" by their employers because they are too old, said Krešimir Sever, the leader of the Croatian Independent Trade Unions (NHS).

The head of the Federation of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (SSSH), Mladen Novosel, said he was confident they would manage to gather the necessary 380,000 signatures or "possibly even twice as many".

Union leaders called on the citizens not to be afraid to sign the petition and not to fall for "lies" which the Ministry of Labour and Pension System spreads under the dictate of "foreign centres of power" that such changes would harm the system and cut pensions.

Signatures will be gathered at about 300 stalls across the country from April 27 to May 11, and there will also be mobile stalls.

More news about referendums in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, April 4, 2019 - Unions called on citizens on Thursday to support their "67 is too much" campaign to call a referendum which would bring back the full retirement age to 65 as it was prior to the pension reform.

The signature collection campaign will run from April 27 to May 11. In support of the campaign, union leader Krešimir Sever said that "Croatians have a shorter life expectancy than the EU average, citizens are sicker, working conditions are harder and technology is at a lower level."

Sever was addressing a conference on the pension system organised by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation together with the three union federations that are organising the referendum petition.

Under the incumbent law, anyone who today is younger than 53 will have to work until the age of 67 unless they have a working life of 41 years. The unions want the full retirement age to be brought back to 65 without penalisation and that the Labour Act allow anyone who wishes to work beyond the age of 65 to do so, Sever explained.

"There is no reason for Croatia to raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67. The system will be more relaxed if those who can and wish to do so continue working, while, on the other hand, people who are ill and tired could retire at 65," Sever said.

The conference heard of experiences in some other European countries – Austria has retained 65 as the retirement age while Belgiium has raised that to 67, similarly to Croatia, which resulted in huge dissatisfaction in Belgian society and union protests.

Transition countries are unique in that regard. Slovakia adopted a clear decision in parliament that has cemented the retirement age at 64 while Poland raised it to 67 and then returned it, the unions claim.

More news about pension system in Croatia can be found in the Business section.

ZAGREB, March 18, 2019 - A union referendum initiative against retiring at the age of 67 called "67 is too much" said on Monday it would collect signatures for the referendum from April 27 to May 11 and that the question would be about lowering the retirement age back to 65.

Speaking at a press conference, union leaders Mladen Nosovel, Krešimir Sever and Vilim Ribić said the referendum would demand to amend the Pension Insurance Act.

The initiative proposes that an insured person be entitled to old age pension upon reaching 65 years of age and having completed 15 years of qualifying periods and to early age pension with 60 years of age and 35 years of qualifying periods, reducing penalisation for early retirement from 0.3% to 0.2, and delaying the equation of the required pension age for men and women.

The three leaders said that by voting in the referendum, citizens would directly repeal the pension reform pushed through by Labour and Pension System Minister Marko Pavić, against which unions announced the referendum last October.

Sever said people in Croatia could not work until they were 67, that penalisation for early retirement was too high and that the equation of the retirement age for men and women had accelerated too much.

He said Croats lived shorter on average than people elsewhere in the EU and that a healthy life in Croatia after the age of 65 was only five years, half the EU average. "We are a sick, overworked and poor nation where people are forced to work to exhaustion, after which they can work four hours also when they retire."

Ribić said the extension of the working life in Croatia was not a necessity but a consequence of political elitism. "Elite groups are to blame for the situation in the country, the outrageous emigration and demographic depression, so we ask that citizens be given back the right to decide."

Novosel said the unions had tried to dissuade the government from the "unreasonable" pension reform, but to no avail.

More news about referendum initiatives in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, February 15, 2019 - There will be no referendums on changes to the election law or on repealing the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, the Croatian parliament decided by a majority vote on Friday.

With 105 votes in favour, 16 against and two abstentions, the parliament upheld the conclusion of its Committee on the Constitution, Standing Orders and Political System which said that conditions had not been met to call the two nation-wide referendums, initiated by two civil society groups - The People Decide and The Truth About the Istanbul Convention.

Explaining its conclusion, the committee recalled that in July 2018 the parliament called on the government to check the number and authenticity of the collected signatures and the lawfulness of their collection, noting that the government has submitted a report from which it arises that the number of signatures required to call a referendum was not collected for either referendum.

"Those of us who have voted against, on behalf of the MOST party, will walk out of the session," said MOST MP Robert Podolnjak.

The Constitution and the Constitutional Law on the Constitutional Court, under which the parliament must address the Constitutional Court on the matter and does not have the right to decide autonomously not to call a national referendum or that conditions for it have not been met, have been breached, said Podolnjak.

The parliamentary vote on the two referendums was also observed by representatives of the two civil society groups which over the past few months had been accusing the government of doing all in its power to prevent the two referendums.

The parliament's vote prompted an ironic round of applause from observers of the two civil society groups.

There is significant difference between politicians, members of parliament and voyeurs, independent MP Marko Vučetić responded. "Voyeurs think that they can enter the area of other people's privacy and personal information, they think that the status of an MP gives them the right to violate others' right to privacy," Vučetić said.

Boris Milošević of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS), too, said that not enough signatures had been collected and referred those dissatisfied with that to the Personal Data Protection Agency (AZOP). "I regret that the referendum questions will not be discussed by the Constitutional Court because they would not pass the test of constitutionality," said Milošević.

Among other things, the referendum petition for changing the election law proposed reducing the number of parliamentary seats for the Serb minority from three, which is how many seats the minority is now entitled to, to one seat.

Milorad Batinić of the Croatian People's Party (HNS), a partner in the ruling majority, said that back in October last year his party had filed a report over unlawful activities during the campaign to collect signatures for the two referendums and signature forgery.

MP Hrvoje Zekanović of the HRAST party used the vote on repealing the Istanbul Convention to approach the speaker's desk and put on it a T-shirt with the message "Two sexes, two genders".

"Here is a T-shirt, not for you but for Prime Minister Andrej Plenković as a memento of the Istanbul Convention," Zekanović told Speaker Gordan Jandroković. "You can wear it yourself, it will fit you nicely," Jandroković countered.

More news on the referendums in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

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.

ZAGREB, January 21, 2019 - Public Administration Minister Lovro Kuščević said on Monday a task force working on amendments to the Referendum Act would hold its first meeting on Tuesday.

The amendments will define deadlines for collecting and verifying signatures as well as for parliament to decide whether a referendum will be called.

Kuščević told reporters the amendments would remove the existing legal loopholes, saying the current law did not define the deadline by which parliament must decide on referendum petitions.

The amendments are planned to be on the government's agenda in the first quarter of the year. "I believe the new law will contribute to greater transparency and a better implementation of referendums as a good form of expression of our fellow citizens' wishes."

Asked if the amended law would stipulate in which cases referendums could not be called, Kuščević said the answer would be given by the task force experts. He voiced confidence they will provide solutions which will protect democracy, the constitution and citizens' right to decide in referendums.

Speaking of the Constitutional Court's dismissal of "The Truth about the Istanbul Convention" and "The People Decide" referendum petitions, Kuščević said it was now up to parliament to decide if there existed conditions for calling referendums on cancelling the ratification of the Istanbul Convention and on amending election legislation as proposed by the pertaining civil initiative.

He believes parliament will conclude the two initiatives did not collect the required number of signatures for calling the two referendums and that parliament will not have to ask the Constitutional Court's opinion.

He said the Court had explained everything clearly in its dismissal and that it was up to parliament to decide whether to call the referendums. "Given that the government's report is transparent, extensive, objective and true, as confirmed by the Constitutional Court, that everything was done in line with the constitution and legal rules, I expect parliament to conclude very soon that the two initiatives didn't collect the legally required number of valid signatures, a minimum 10%, and that it simply won't call a referendum."

Kuščević dismissed the initiatives' claims that the Public Administration Ministry had stalled the verification of signatures.

More news on the referendum initiatives in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, January 21, 2019 - The Constitutional Court has dismissed motions by the referendum initiatives "The Truth about the Istanbul Convention" and "The People Decide", the court said on its website on Monday.

The motions were rejected in two separate rulings in late December 2018. The rulings were adopted by a majority of votes with one dissenting opinion.

The two civil society groups asked the court to declare the verification of signatures gathered for their referendum petitions null and void.

The Truth about the Istanbul Convention had launched a signature gathering campaign for a referendum to abrogate 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.

More news on the referendum initiatives can be found in the Politics section.