President of the Independent Roads Union Mijat Stanic, who was the main person behind an initiative to call a referendum against the government’s plan to lease Croatian motorways, said on Tuesday that he wasn’t surprised that the Constitutional Court had rejected a request to temporarily ban any further procedures until the referendum was finalised.
“The Constitutional Court’s decision doesn’t surprise us. It is well explained and founded even though we would have liked a decision as we had requested because that would have accelerated the process of regulating the law on referendums which now does not specify any schedule for the procedures once citizens have collected signatures. The entire procedure can be delayed indefinitely and that is in fact why we requested the temporary ban,” Stanic said for Hina.
The Constitutional Court on Monday rejected the request by the civil society group led by Stanic to ban the government and transport ministry from taking any further steps in this regard until the results of the referendum which they called for after collecting 530,000 signatures are made known. In its ruling the Constitutional Court stated that there were no grounds for it to act in this matter.
Stanic believes that this option for the Court should be regulated by law in order to accelerate procedures. “Signatures for our referendum are still being checked even though when it comes to presidential elections, this is done in two days. There should be no reason why a check of signatures cannot be conducted in no more than a week and then there would be no need for temporary bans to be requested,” he said.
“I’m convinced that the motorways will not be leased because a vast majority of citizens are against it,” said Stanic.