Latvian President proposes halving signature number to initiate referendum / Article

The amendments to the Law on Referendums, Legislative Initiatives and European Citizens’ Initiatives were sent by the President to the Saeima on Monday, March 31, the President’s Chancellery said in a press release.

Since 2012, the procedure requires that a tenth, or more than 150,000, of the electorate’s signatures must be collected within a year in order to initiate a referendum. Since then, all attempts to collect signatures for a referendum have failed.

In 2014, the Constitutional Court concluded that the new procedure for collecting signatures was compatible with the Constitution, but the Court also stressed that the legislator had to ensure that the requirements were enforceable and that voters could exercise their right of legislative initiative.

In his letter to the Saeima, the President pointed out that since 2013, the Saeima had not considered any draft law suggested by voters, “which raises doubts as to whether the existing procedure truly allows voters to effectively exercise their right of legislative initiative”.

The President proposes to halve the number of signatures required, but also to shorten the time for collecting signatures for a referendum. This would require the collection of one-twentieth, or about 75,000, of the voters’ signatures within six months.

“The state would only take an active part in the signature collection process if at least one twentieth of the number of voters who participated in the last parliamentary elections sign the initiative within six months of its registration. Thereafter, the collection of signatures should be organized in the same way as the law provides for referendums, in addition to the possibility of electronic signatures for the voters’ legislative initiative during the second stage of the signature collection,” the President said in a letter to the Presidium of the Saeima.

The draft law provides that the new procedure for submitting voters’ legislative initiatives would apply to draft laws or draft amendments to the Constitution submitted to the Central Election Commission for assessment and registration after January 1, 2027, in order to give the responsible institutions reasonable time to do everything necessary to comply with the new procedure.

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