Croatia’s Homeland Movement MP Milan Vrkljan has said the current COVID-19 response team should be dissolved.
“We agree with the president of the republic that it’s a para-body, a body outside the constitution and the law and that it was established in the interest of a very small, narrow group of people covered by party affiliation,” he told the press on Monday.
As for the establishment of a new team, Vrkljan said the parliamentary health committee should discuss the issue and propose to the government how a new team should be established. He said the team should be relieved of any politics as soon as possible and be left up to experts, and that everyone in Croatia who could and should say something should be involved in its work. “That’s definitely not just doctors who are members of the HDZ.”
MP Nikola Grmoja of the Bridge party said parliament should “definitely” examine the activity of the team which had lost all credibility. He said the case of HSLS MP Dario Hrebak showed that “if you are close enough to those in power, you don’t have to self-isolate if you are needed for the parliamentary majority.”
Grmoja said the team was compromised by the fact that its key members were candidates in the recent parliamentary election, and that Bridge agreed with President Zoran Milanovic’s assessment of the team, said HINA news agency on Monday.
President Zoran Milanovic said on Sunday that the national COVID-19 response team was not legally established and that it needed authority for the decisions it was making, and that parliament should play a key part in that.
“I warned the prime minister that people will sue the state because the decisions aren’t legally founded. That team is a para-body. The Constitutional Court will have to decide on that,” Croatian President Milanovic said. /argumentum.al
