The refusal of the Novgorod Region Duma to give the floor to the oppositional party at the plenary meeting was recognised unlawful

Press Release, 09.07.2018

On 6 July, the Novgorod District Court satisfied the claim of the regional branch of Yabloko to the regional Duma and found the refusal of the legislative body to allow the opposition party the right to speak at a plenary meeting unlawful.

Since the beginning of 2018, the Yabloko party has been unsuccessfully trying to make the Novgorod Regional Duma implement the Federal Law “On Political Parties”, which guarantees non-parliamentary parties the right to speak at a plenary session of the legislature at least once a year. The Regional Duma without any motive denied Yabloko participation in the Duma meeting on 14 March, when Andrei Nikitin, Governor of the Novgorod Region, reported to the Duma on the work of the regional government for 2017. Moreover, Anna Cherepanova, Chair of the Novgorod regional branch of Yabloko, was not even allowed to enter the assembly hall. The decision on the refusal was taken by the commission on regulations and ethics of the regional Duma, which includes representatives of parliamentary parties United Russia, Fair Russia, the Communist Party and the LDPR. According to Anna Cherepanova, this was done to ensure comfort for the Governor and the Chairman of the Duma so that any hard questions would have been ruled out.

However, the court made a decision in favour of Yabloko despite the opinion of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which conducted a formal check and virtually copied out the Duma’s reply word for word.

The Novgorod branch of Yabloko expressed its readiness to conclude an agreement on reconciliation of the parties, provided that before the end of 2018 the representative of the party would be given the floor to speak from the parliamentary rostrum, but Yelena Pisareva, Chair of the Novgorod Duma, refused to make a compromise.

“The right for a non-parliamentary party to participate and speak at the sessions of the regional parliament is extremely important,” Anna Cherepanova, Chair of the Novgorod Yabloko, noted. “The residents of the Novgorod region should be able to hear at least once a year a different point of view on the development of the region. We carefully prepared for the meeting, proposed a topic for the speech. However, the regional Duma did its utmost to prevent the speech of the Yabloko party both on 28 February and 14 March. Unfortunately, the court could not restore our right because of the article of the regulations, which established the deadline for filing an application before 1 June. We believe that it is necessary to exclude from the regulations the norms restricting the rights of non-parliamentary parties to participate in the work of the Novgorod Regional Duma, and to dismiss the deputies who violated the federal law from the Duma commission on regulations and ethics”.