Discrimination

Saturday, 8 January 2011

Misusing the Signatures of the Coalition Members and Partner Organisations

The member organisations of the Coalition against Discrimination and partner organisations request from the authors of the website www.ostavkaciplic.com to immediately delete the undersigned organisations from the list of the organisations that demand the resignation of Minister Ciplic. The content of this website, which was activated last week, clearly suggests that the demand for the resignation of Minister Ciplic is the expression of support to Petar Antic, who until recently was the Assistant Minister. Our organisations were undersigned in this context and without any consultation with us.

We emphasise that our request for removing our signatures of support should not be interpreted as the support to Minister Ciplic, but as our commitment to cooperation and joint initiatives with other organisations based on the relations of trust, respect and consistency in action.

More specifically, in March 2010 our organisations sent a request for the resignation of Minister Ciplic because of "his unacceptable attitude towards civil society organisations, obstruction and ignorance of the law for whose application the Ministry he heads is responsible, lack of elementary knowledge and understanding of human rights, and failure to assume responsibility for disrespectful conduct and obstruction of the work of State Secretary Marko Karadzic". Unfortunately, Petar Antic, then the Assistant Minister, did not show his willingness to support this request, or even to give a public statement thereof, or to express collegial solidarity with Marko Karadzic, who pointed to shortcomings in the work of Minister Ciplic.

We feel that taking our signatures out of context and using them without prior consultation with us is an inappropriate and unusual practice of abuse and laying claim on other initiatives. Given the considerable distress and distrust that this act has caused among civil society organisations, we believe that the website author is obliged to notify all the organisations whose signatures have been taken about the online initiative to enable them to express their views about the issue. In addition, given all the efforts that we put together to build confidence among civil society organisations, the visitors of this website should have the opportunity to be informed about this "misunderstanding" and the reasons for requesting the removal of the signatures of our organisations from the published list of organisations.

The members of the Coalition against Discrimination are: Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Civil Rights Defenders, Labris - Lesbian Human Rights Organisation, Anti-Trafficking Centre, Network of the Committees for Human Rights in Serbia (CHRIS Network), Association of Students with Disabilities, Gayten LGBT, Praxis and Regional Center for Minorities.

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