| Russia's parliament on Wednesday gave initial backing
to tough new
rules for calling referendums - praised by supporters as a boost to
democracy and denounced by opponents as a strait-jacket. A Kremlin-sponsored
draft law on referendums rallied 343 votes at the first reading in the
450-seat State Duma, the lower house dominated by President Vladimir Putin's
allies.
Opponents say the change to a multi-step procedure for demanding
referendums, complicated by tight deadlines, would mean no political or
public force would be able to call one - except the Kremlin itself, with
its
vast administrative reach. Earlier on Wednesday police broke up a protest
outside the Duma building in central Moscow, which was called by Communists
and the liberal Yabloko party, and detained some of the 100-odd people
demonstrating against the new rules.
"The rules for calling and conducting a referendum violate people's
rights and make a fiction of a constitutional norm saying that sovereign
power belongs to people," liberal deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov told reporters
after the vote. Ryzhkov said his allies would appeal against the law in
the
Constitutional Court should it pass after two more readings.
Post-Soviet Russia has seen only one referendum, called by President
Boris Yeltsin in 1993 to win public backing in his standoff with a hardline
parliament. In the end, Yeltsin dissolved parliament and sent tanks to
storm
its headquarters. Since then the Communist party - the single most powerful
political force in Russia until the triumph of pro-Putin's United Russia
party in last year's parliamentary polls - has repeatedly tried to call
referendums on different issues.
But the Kremlin has successfully used a set of sophisticated legal
levers to sink Communist initiatives in a bureaucratic quagmire and in
turn
accused its opponents of calling for plebiscites to gain publicity for
their
political campaigns. The chairman of the central elections commission,
Alexander Veshnyakov, said the new law would rule out such campaigning
gambits without hampering the people's constitutional rights.
"If an issue for the referendum is really burning, than there
will be
no problem doing the necessary paperwork to call it," he told reporters.
See also:
Human
Rights
| 