Novi Sad Students Removed From Signature Collection Room
Students from the Agrarian Reform group say Novi Sad's Faculty of Agriculture election commission threw them out of the signature room, with the August 31 deadline days away.
Representatives of the informal student group Agrarian Reform were removed from the room at the Faculty of Agriculture in Novi Sad where signatures of support are collected for their bid in the Student Parliament elections. The expulsion happened on the third day of signature collection, with the deadline to submit the complete list falling on August 31.
According to broadcaster N1, the removal was allowed by Zarko Miskin, president of the Student Parliament and, at the same time, a member of the faculty’s election commission. Elections for the new Student Parliament are scheduled for September 15. For a candidate list to be accepted, it must collect signatures from 10 percent of enrolled students, which at the Faculty of Agriculture amounts to about 260 signatures.
The Agrarian Reform group says it was given only three days, from August 24 to 26, to gather that many signatures. Sources disagree on the exact hours: N1 reports that signing took place from 9 a.m. to noon, while Radio Sto Plus writes that collection ran from 8 a.m. to noon and that the commission, because of strong interest from students, kept working into the afternoon on the day in question.
“Today is the third day of collecting signatures, and when they saw that we were going to get the number we needed, they simply threw us out of the room,” Nikola Stojanovic, a student from the Agrarian Reform group, told N1. According to him, representatives of the list had been allowed to stay in the room where signatures are submitted for the first two days, but were denied that access today.
Stojanovic adds that the group has not yet been shown the rulebook governing the procedure for collecting and submitting signatures, and that they requested a written explanation of the decision to exclude them from the room but have not received one so far.
Petar Botoski, also a student from Agrarian Reform, said that just before the expulsion he noticed part of the paperwork had not been filled out correctly.
“We suspect they will then declare those signatures invalid,” Botoski told N1, arguing that this was the result of the election commission failing to properly guide students on how to fill out the forms.
Unlike Agrarian Reform, the Student Organization of the Faculty of Agriculture, which currently holds a majority in the Student Parliament, did not have to collect signatures for its list. As a registered student organization at the faculty, it is exempt from that requirement, while informal groups like Agrarian Reform must go through the entire verification process and gather support within a short deadline.
According to N1, the group tried to register as a student organization back in April, but the election commission rejected that request, and a later appeal to the faculty council was also denied. The explanation, Agrarian Reform says, concerned the date of their registration with the Serbian Business Registers Agency, even though, under the rules, Student Parliament elections should have been held back in April rather than in August and September.
Stojanovic also told N1 that some students have since approached them asking to have their signatures withdrawn from the Agrarian Reform list. “We suspect they are being pressured and threatened,” he said, adding that the group is preparing criminal complaints over what it describes as pressure on signatories. In the room where signatures are submitted, according to the same source, only two members of the election commission are currently present, one of them Miskin, the president of the Student Parliament.
Neither the Faculty of Agriculture nor the election commission had responded to the students’ claims by the time this article was published. N1 said it would publish Zarko Miskin’s response once it reaches the newsroom. The N1 report was published on August 26.
The deadline to submit signatures expires on Sunday, August 31, just days before the final candidate lists for the September 15 elections are due to be known. By then it should be clear whether Agrarian Reform managed to collect the required number of signatures, and whether part of what has already been gathered will be challenged as invalid, as the students suspect.
