Members of the Civic Coalition for Free and Fair Elections express their profound concern about the judgements passed by the Court of Chisinau and the Chisinau Appeals Court by which the mayoral elections held in Chisinau municipality on May 20 (first round) and June 3 (runoffs) were invalidated. The members of the Coalition fully disagree with the formulated motivation and arguments for invalidating the vote of over 240,000 citizens of Chisinau municipality or of about 40% of the electorate. By a statement that was presented in a news conference at IPN on June 22, the signatories ask the courts of law to implement the law and quash the judgments passed on June 19 and, respectively, June 21.
The signatories said the motivation of the courts of law is defective, inconclusive and further undermines the citizens’ confidence in the independence and professionalism of the judicial system. “The Election Code envisions three types of penalties: juridical (electoral), contraventional and penal. For illegal electoral agitation, the candidate or candidates are contraventionally penalized with a fine of at most 1,500 lei (about € 75). In fact, by invalidating the elections, the courts punished all the over 240,000 voters who took part in the elections, none of whom challenged the legality of the elections, and also all the taxpayers of the Republic of Moldova who pay taxes into the state budget from which the new local elections were financed,” said the Council’s secretary Polina Panainte, reading the statement.
According to the executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy ADEPT Igor Botan, the influence of the calls to vote made on the election day, which is invoked by the court, could have been both positive and negative. For the elections to be invalidated, the ordinary court was to prove that the influence was negative. Such a proof cannot be valid if only the citizens or the election runners challenge the election outcome or if the citizens express their dissatisfaction directly through protests. If the calls of the electoral contenders on the election day led to a higher voter turnout in the runoffs, the court was to prove that a higher participation spoils the electoral process, but such a thing cannot be proven. The Centru branch of the Court of Chisinau challenged an influence that it didn’t classify somehow. This fact disqualifies the decision to invalidate the elections.
The signatories of the statement say the abstract decisions of the courts of law undermine the whole electoral process that should end with the election of the mayor of Chisinau municipality, as the law provides. If the courts invalidated the elections, they should have exactly and unequivocally identified those to blame that were to be eliminated from the electoral competition and the election should have been rerun. This wasn’t done and the impact of the decisions caused the voters’ protest.
The continuation of the practice of a selective justice by the judicial system is another aspect signaled by the NGOs. Pavel Postica, programs director of Promo-LEX, said in the case of the Shor Party’s candidate for mayor in Jora de Mijloc village of Orhei district, where claims about violations were indeed filed, the contender should have been penalized with the exclusion from the race and, implicitly, the elections should have been nullified for the reason of voter corruption, but the election there was validated. On the other hand, in Chisinau, for a minor violation that is punished with a fine of not more than 1,500 lei that can be imposed exclusively on the candidate responsible for the deviation and that is not included in the list of juridical penalties that can lead to the exclusion from the electoral race, the election was invalidated and the winner was actually excluded from the race.
The statement also noted the delay and lack of transparency in the process of examining this case and the negative consequences of the election invalidation. According to the signatories, the trenchant attitudes of the development partners coincide with the assessments concerning the failure of the justice sector reform that was once again confirmed by the unjustified court decisions not to validate the election of the mayor of Chisinau municipality.
The statement was signed by the members of the Civic Coalition for Free and Fair Elections that consists of 35 organizations and by the members of the National Platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum and other NGOs.
