After the group organising a petition for a referendum to be held on changing the election system announced it had collected enough signatures to formally request a referendum, Public Administration Minister, Lovro Kuscevic, said on Wednesday that holding a referendum which delved into the rights of ethnic minorities is a sensitive issue.

As for whether the referendum questions proposed – including the one about reducing voting rights of MPs representing ethnic minorities – are in line with the Constitution, Kuscevic said that the Parliament would need to decide whether the opinion of the Constitutional Court would be formally requested.

“Having a referendum to decide on matters related to human rights, minority rights, and international agreements is a sensitive issue. Those matters need to be well-regulated,” Kuscevic said.

The civil initiative, called The People Decides, said on Facebook on Tuesday that it had collected enough signatures during their two-week campaign earlier this month to call a referendum on election law.However, the group did not specify how many signatures had been collected.

According to Croatian law, at least 10 percent of the eligible electorate, or nearly 375,000 voters, need to sign a petition for a national referendum to be requested.

Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandrokovic said today that the referendum would be held if the civic group had indeed collected enough authentic signatures for it.

“The government will entrust the Public Administration Ministry to check the authenticity of the signatures, and if it establishes that they are authentic and that their number is sufficient, we will most probably have a referendum,” Jandrokovic told reporters on Wednesday.

The procedure is clear, and it is irrelevant whether I or someone else agrees with the referendum, Jandrokovic replied when asked if he agreed to the proposed changes which include lowering the election threshold to 4 percent, and reducing the size of the currently 151-seat parliament to 120 seats.

Asked if the parliament would ask the Constitutional Court to determine if the second referendum question, concerning ethnic minority MPs, was in line with the Constitution, Jandrokovic said that the matter had not been discussed yet.

“Once we have the signatures and the procedure is completed, we will make a decision on that,” he said.

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