The Slovak government has delayed the amendment to the Law on Petition Rights until October 2014.
The amendment that was planned to be discussed in parliament in November 2013 has aroused much attention. The Centre for Philanthropy initiated a petition that required a mass comment to be included in the amendment. The petition was signed by more than one thousand people, the Sme daily wrote November 20. Afterwards, the Government Office then called many of the purported signatories to see if their signatures were valid. To this day, the government has not explained it activity.
The Centre for Philanthropy approached the Government Office in this matter, and n the bill was postponed “so that the legislation procedure to the above mentioned amendment to the law on the petition right is as transparent as possible,” Marcel Zajac of the Centre for Philanthropy told SITA.
The centre’s petition wants changes that maintain the 60 day deadline for responding to petitions, rather than extend it to 90 days as has been proposed. It also asks that the threshold for petitions considered by the government require just 500 signatures or at least 5 percent of municipality inhabitants. It also asked to abolish the requirement for using the technically complex electronic signature procedure for petitions.
(Source: TASR, SITA)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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