The Centre for Monitoring and Research CeMI calls on the Ministry of Interior to consistently respect political and legal obligations on effective control of the voter register, and to immediately conduct procedures to verify and possibly revoke citizenship and delete all illegally registered voters from the Montenegrin voters' list.
Determining that they cannot continue the procedure in deleting double-registered voters, the Ministry of the Interior does not fulfill the clear request of the European Commission from this year's Report for Montenegro, which explicitly requires the competent institutions to thoroughly investigate allegations of double-registered voters in one or more countries. This behavior of the Ministry of the Interior and open confrontation with the requirements of the EC contributes to further slowing down the negotiation process of Montenegro in terms of political criteria for Montenegro's EU membership, and will almost certainly be the basis for new criticism of Brussels.
Referring to the opinion of the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information, according to whom "the processing of data submitted to them would be illegal", we estimate that the Ministry of the Interior only found an excuse not to exercise the legally entrusted competencies to control the voter register. The questioning opinion of the director of the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information cannot abolish the legal competence and the obligation of the Ministry of the Interior to act. This attitude of the Ministry of the Interior calls into question the existence of the political will of the current government and is carrying out activities aimed at improving citizens' trust in the election process.
With this approach, the Ministry of the Interior did not provide an institutional response to CeMI's request, accompanied by evidence of the existence of 2,691 voters from Herceg Novi who are registered in Montenegro and have registered residence in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and 961 voters from Niksic who are registered in Montenegro and they have registered residence in Serbia. It is about a total of 3651 voters who should be deleted from the voters' list.
We remind you that this Government has formed the Council for the Control of the Voters register, and the Ministry of the Interior has formed the Council for Transparency, which deals with the control of the voters register. Unfortunately, these two tips when it comes to controlling the voters' list and deleting illegally registered voters did not meet expectations or the goal of why they were formed.
We call on the Ministry of the Interior and the Government to turn to settling the situation in the voter register, because they need to be cleansed of those who illegally have the right to vote, regardless of which party they vote for.