The 16-month old dispute over the election of the country’s Attorney General looks set to continue despite a ruling of the Constitutional Court last week that President Ivan Gasparovic should accept the election that took place in parliament in June 2011 or state the grounds for his refusal.
The President seemingly took a ‘personal dislike’ to the winning candidate Jozef Centes, who was nominated by the four-party coalition government at the time and who beat rival Dobroslav Trnka (backed by Robert Fico’s SMER-SD party). Since the vote in parliament, the crucial post of Attorney General has been occupied by an interim head thanks to the President’s stalling.
The court ruling says President Gasparovic can either appoint Centes or give reasons why he would not. Until now the President was using the awaited rulings of the Constitutional Court as his excuse, and his spokesman is now cited by SME daily as saying the President would not deal with the issue just now and would wait for all complaints in the case to be fully processed.
The irony of that being that the complaint concerns “inactivity” and was filed by Centes, who refers to the President’s attitude as absurd. The President still hasn’t given any specific reasons for such adamant refusal to fill the hot seat, especially as he is essentially supposed to be impartial and not stand in the way of a democratically elected candidate.
When Centes was voted in parliament, the Smer-SD party of Robert Fico lodged an appeal against the election with the Constitutional Court, but it overruled the complaint. That is when the President stepped up and used the loophole in the law, which does not set out any specific deadline by which he should appoint the new Attorney General. The 16 months of stalling will therefore continue thanks to the inadequacy of Slovak law and the President’s ability to use it according to his own agenda.
Gaspar the Ghost needs impeaching, his blatent abuse of power is a National disgrace and has damaged Slovakia’s already less than peachy standing in the world community. How many points on the TI league table will this cost? The Sk will soon be in the same division as …….. , well no, in a league of their own.
This idea that the prevarication is just an unexplained whim of GtG is a joke. There is only one explaination why the duly elected General Procurator has not been appointed to his post and that is GtG and/or his puppetmasters are scared sh*tless that Centes will immediately investigate all the lumps in the office carpet.
It’s stories like this that make me so dismissive of much of Sk society. Hundreds turn out and demonstrate about foriegn countries applying their laws and due process to issues yet they just sit at home, fingers up bums, brains in neutral, while the “old guard” abuse and destroy the basic principles of law and democracy here in the Sk for their own benefit.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink – Oh so true.
He’s a pathetic old clown.