Speaker of Parliament Andrej Danko (source: SME)
The discussion on the coalition proposal to scrap amnesties granted by former prime minister Vladimír Mečiar was postponed by one week.
The representatives of the coalition and the opposition agreed to start talks on March 28 at the parliamentary panel, the TASR newswire reported.
The opposition is ready to support the initiative, but has five conditions.
First is the guarantee that the cases concerning the abduction of the son of ex-president Michal Kováč and the murder of Róbert Remiáš will not be time-barred.
Second, the coalition and the opposition should reach a political agreement on their joint representative before the Constitutional Court which, according to the proposal, should decide on scrapping the amnesties. The representative should be able to hand in complaints on the bias of some Constitutional Court judges.
The opposition also calls for scrapping the pardon Kováč granted to his son and other people accused in the Technopol case, including tycoon Marián Kočner.
Another condition is that the Constitutional Court should not start a discussion on amnesties ex officio, but only when at least 30 MPs turn to it. The last condition is that also the Slovak president and the government should participate in the proceeding, TASR wrote.
Since it is required that at least 90 MPs should support the proposal on scrapping amnesties, the coalition needs at least 10 opposition votes.
The opposition claims that the coalition has already accepted four conditions. The only one that remains open concerns the Technopol case.
The opposition still insists on its refusal to discuss the proposal in a fast-tracked procedure. To approve this, however, the coalition does not need opposition votes, TASR wrote.
“It seems we will manage it,” said Speaker of Parliament Andrej Danko when commenting on the results of the meeting with opposition, as quoted by TASR.
As for the five conditions, he said the coalition has not rejected them and asked the opposition to deliver them in written form.
“I will then be able to tell you what exactly I think of them,” Danko added, as quoted by TASR.
