Centre for Civic Education (CCE) highlights the importance of affirming direct citizen engagement with the legislative branch and calls on the Parliament of Montenegro to more effectively promote digital tools in this context, including e-petitions and electronic question submissions to MPs.
The CCE reminds that the e-petition portal of the Parliament began operating in 2023 with the goal of making the Parliament more accessible to citizens. At that time, the Parliament announced that citizens would be able to “easily use modern technologies to raise issues related to legislative activity, thereby influencing the policymaking process”.
The e-petition portal outlines clear rules for submitting and signing petitions. Among other things, petitions must be clearly formulated, free of offensive or unlawful content, and not incite discrimination. They may be submitted or supported later by Montenegrin citizens and foreigners with permanent residence, via an online form that requires entering personal data (including a national ID number) and a specific proposal for actions the Parliament should undertake. However, what happens after the petition is submitted and signed is less clearly defined, and there is no mechanism for citizens to track the progress of their petitions.
According to statistics available on the Parliament’s website, a total of 28 petition submissions were made in 2023, and 23 in 2024. This indicates that the platform has not been sufficiently promoted, and also that the Parliament’s current handling of the mechanism has discouraged many people, as they continue to use non-institutional websites like Peticije.online and Change.org rather than this official tool.
The portal explains that if at least 6,000 citizens support a petition within 60 days, the competent parliamentary committee will review its content and decide whether to formalize it as a legislative proposal (excluding issues related to the state budget or spatial planning). Nevertheless, in practice, not all petitions that reached the required number of signatures within the 60-day window were reviewed by committees, while some were given priority treatment.
Out of the seven petitions that gathered enough signatures in 2023 and 2024, only four were reviewed by committees – three from 2023 and one from 2024. There is no legal provision mandating that all such petitions be reviewed by the competent committee, which allows the Parliament to dismiss petitions it does not consider important without detailed explanation.
Additionally, the mechanism for electronically submitting questions to MPs has not been promoted. Citizens can submit questions to members of Parliament via a digital form on the ePetition portal, with the note that anonymous, vague, or offensive questions will not be considered. According to the Parliament’s own statistics, which claims to be updated daily, no one has used this mechanism so far.
CCE urges the Parliament of Montenegro to better promote these mechanisms intended to strengthen public trust in institutions, to increase transparency regarding the processing and outcomes of submitted petitions, and to ensure the protection of citizens’ personal data. When these mechanisms are used properly and effectively, they benefit the whole society. This is why it is particularly important that citizens’ trust not be abused, and that everyone has equal opportunities within the system.
Unfortunately, the current practice leaves room for doubt among many, as illustrated by the example of the petition to preserve Velika Plaža, which gathered about 11,500 signatures in two weeks via the Change.org platform – demonstrating the public’s preference for non-institutional alternatives.
Sara Čabarkapa, Programme Coordinator for Active Citizenship