BRATISLAVA, April 30, (WEBNOVINY)- In a debate on the upcoming prosecutor general election in the parliament in the regular ‘Saturday Dialogues’ program on Slovak Radio, SMER-SD Deputy Chairman and MP Robert Kalinak said that if MPs during the repeated secret election of the new prosecutor general will take their ballot papers out of the room and will not throw them in the ballot box it will mean that the vote was not secret again. He said that he unfortunately does not believe that the coalition is serious when it declares that it really wants the vote to be secret this time.
KDH MP Radoslav Prochazka said that it is the task of Speaker of Parliament Richard Sulik to secure the secret ballot. According to him, in the parliamentary election of the new prosecutor general MPs will have four options: to vote for, to vote against, to refrain from the vote and to not vote. “Each of these four possibilities are fully accessible to each deputy. No control mechanisms, no organized instructions, 79 MPs will simply go to perform the election act,” he stated. Kalinak reacted that the aforementioned options do not include the possibility of taking ballot papers out of the room. He insists, that the number of ballot papers in the ballot box has to correspond with the number of ballot papers distributed to deputies before the voting. “Only then conditions of a secret ballot will be met and they [the coalition] will not risk that the Constitutional Court will again cancel the secret election to them,” he said.
The repeated secret prosecutor general election should take place on the first day of the May session. At the last secret ballot to elect the new prosecutor general, Dobroslav Trnka whose term in office ended in February was a mere one vote short of being reelected to the post. The coalition feared that Trnka might be reelected as prosecutor general and thus its MPs took photos of their ballots and published them to prove they did not vote for Trnka. The Constitutional Court however ruled that such behavior thwarted the secret ballot and infringed rights of one of the candidates, Dobroslav Trnka and ordered to repeat the secret ballot. Meanwhile the coalition voted to pass a bill to change the parliamentary standing order enabling a public vote on the new prosecutor general. However, last week the president vetoed the bill, which is now back in parliament.
SITA