Home > 1.1 Universal suffrage > SERBIA - Joint Recommendations on the Laws on Parliamentary, Presidential and Local Elections and Electoral Administration
 
 
 
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Paragraph 44
 
Following the Constitutional Court decisions,[8] the parts of Article 88 providing that a mandate of an elected member of parliament shall expire if she/he ceases to be a member of the political party or coalition on whose candidate list she/he was elected, do no longer exist. This rule raised obvious problems. Once elected, deputies should be accountable primarily to the voters who elected them, not to their political party. This flows from the fact that they hold a mandate from the people, not from their party. The fact that a deputy has resigned from or has been expelled from the party should therefore not entail their expulsion from parliament. Furthermore, such a provision contradicted Paragraph 7.9 of the 1990 OSCE Copenhagen Document. The OSCE/ODIHR and the Venice Commission recommend that should the law be amended in this area in the future, new provisions should ensure that mandates of elected representatives belong to them and not to political parties on which lists they were elected.