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Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Social Democrat Eugen Nicolicea said on Friday that Parliament will endorse President Klaus Iohannis's request regarding the May 26 referendum.
"As regards the referendum, I said this also in my capacity as House Deputy Speaker, just as it issued Opinion No. 5/2017, Parliament will endorse the President's request to call a consultative referendum that has no decisional effects, with the recommendations made there, which were nothing else but excerpts from the Constitution, the Court's rulings and the recommendations of the Venice Commission, leaving it to the President to start the referendum, word the question and take responsibility for this action; Parliament has no effective power whatsoever in this referendum," Nicolicea said after consultations with the head of state at the Cotroceni Palace.
Klaus Iohannis this Friday consulted with the PSD delegation on the situation in justice. The delegation of the Social Democratic Party was made of Eugen Nicolicea and former political prisoners Marin Iancu and Ioan Muntean, who served time at Aiud; Marin Iancu is also a revolutionary.
Nicolicea presented the two proposals for referendum questions: "Fellow Romanians, is it moral, legal and constitutional, that 30 years after the bloody anti-communist December 1989 Revolution former torturers be tolerated in high-ranking positions of authority? Is it normal that, 30 years after the fall of the communist oppressive regime, former torturers be promoted to gigantic leadership positions?."
Ioan Muntean said that at the end of the meeting he asked President Iohannis to sign the decree to remove from office Prosecutor General Augustin Lazar. He mentioned that Lazar was one of those who twice postponed his release from the Aiud Penitentiary.
"I asked the President to sign the decree to remove him from office and the President answered that he would see," the former political prisoner said.
In his turn, Marin Iancu said that until his appearance on television he didn't know who the prosecutor who had rejected his petition for release from prison was, but depicted him as a servant who cold-heartedly signed a four-year extension of his jail time.
President Iohannis also had a separate discussion with the two former political prisoners.
