No guarantees that these are signatures of real people – a result of the Dutch Government’s answer on the lawyers’ request about the legitimacy of initiating a referendum on the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine.
The Dutch Internal Affairs Ministry informed that the authenticity of more than 400,000 signatures gathered by activists in the Netherlands to trigger last year’s referendum on the European Union treaty with Ukraine had been never verified, according to The New York Times.
The law requires a number of 300,000 requests for the decision to hold a referendum. To hold Ukraine-EU referendum were made more than 427,000 valid requests within six weeks, though the signatures of voters were not verified.
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The Dutch Electoral Council’s spokeswoman for confirmed to that a sampling of names had been checked to verify they were those of registered voters, but not whether the signatures themselves were real.
“The Dutch referendum law does not require the signatures to be verified,” said Heleen Hörmann.
“When we evaluated the law we raised concerns … about the process. There is no way for the signatures to be verified because they were never entered in the system,” said the official.
Dutch MP from the opposition party D66 Case Verhoeven said that shocked this information.
“I would like to know about it in advance and to take it seriously. In this regard, the question arises whether all the signatures are real and whether the referendum should really take place, “- said Verhoeven.
“We are against referendums. But if you do it in any case, it is important that the signatures were verified by those who represent them “, – said the deputy Mustafa Amauch.
Actually before the referendum the Dutch Electoral Council had recommended that the government use its national digital identification system DigiD, for the referendum application, but that piece of advice was rejected.
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The result forced Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to seek a compromise deal with 27 other EU member states that eventually saved the agreement.
A referendum on the approval of the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine took place in the Netherlands, on April 6, 2016. 39% of voters supported the ratification of the agreement while 61% didn’t, with the turnout made 32.28%. Dutch voters rejected the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, which was strongly opposed by the Russian Federation.
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