ZAGREB, July 27, 2020 – Homeland Movement MP Milan Vrkljan said on Monday 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 press.
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.”
Grmoja: Parliament should examine COVID-19 response team’s activity
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.
“Bridge was the first not to give the team those powers,” he said, adding that the current team might be dissolved.
“It’s possible, but that would require the goodwill and the political will of the prime minister to include in the team’s work people who will be proposed by all parliamentary parties,” Grmoja said.
He added, however, that those in power would refuse “because the team was their key lever in the election campaign and the election victory and they will keep it that way, but they will also bear the consequences.”
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.”
