PARNAS Party appealed to the Constitutional Court the opportunity to challenge FMS data in regard to collection of signatures

On 20 November, the party spokesman Vyacheslav Gimadi informed the agency ‘Interfax-Siberia’ that PARNAS Party has submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Court (CC) against the order of collecting signatures applied to political parties preparatory to elections.

The appeal was registered by the Constitutional Court and it is under the process of preliminary hearing.

‘We are asking to declare the 67th Law ‘On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights of Citizens’ unconstitutional to the extent that the electoral association cannot challenge the information indicated in the certificate issued by FMS. As we have already noticed, the FMS database can contain errors, however the association has no legal possibility to challenge it’, - said Gimadi.

Gimadi also informed about initiation of a similar complaint to the European Court of Human Rights. It will be submitted in late November - early December.

We would like to remind that in the course of election campaign in preparation to the September 13 Elections PARNAS and some other parties faced some situations when the FMS data, taken as a ground for validation of signatures, contained errors. In particular, the signature of voter Darya Timurovna was  invalidated as her name was entered as Daria Timurovich in the FMS database. Electoral associations have filed complaints to court against the decisions of election commissions, however without success; the courts had no reason to doubt the FMS database.