The Croatian parliament's Committee on the Constitution, Standing Orders and Political System and Legislation Committee on Tuesday decided by a majority vote to start the process of amending the Constitution.

Following a two-and-a-half-hour debate, members of the Constitution Committee voted unanimously in favor of proceeding with amendment of the Constitution and the Constitutional Act on the Constitutional Court with regard to referendum regulation, while members of the Legislation Committee made the decisions by a majority vote.

The committees discussed the proposal for a decision on initiating the amendment of the Constitution at the proposal of 92 MPs.

The Social and Democratic Party (SDP) announced it would support initiating the amendment of the Constitution and the Constitutional Act on the Constitutional Court, but party leader MP Pedja Grbin warned that the Constitutional Court was receiving enormous discretionary powers with regard to deciding what issues were suitable for a referendum decision and that the matters on which it couldn’t be decided in that way had to be explicitly stated in the Constitution.

He stressed that he supported the reduction of the number of signatures for a referendum petition to 250,000, as well as defining a quorum for decision-making.

MP Branko Bacic (HDZ) said, commenting on the opposition’s criticism of the powers of the Constitutional Court and the decision-making quorum, that they were open to quality suggestions. He underscored the need for regulating the referendum legislation.

Public Ombudswoman Tena Simonovic-Einwalter said that the issues on which a decision should not be made in a referendum were not defined well, especially with regard to human rights. She underscored that those issues also had to be defined in the Constitution, and not in the Constitutional Act on the Constitutional Court.