Free Trieste

Referendum against oil drilling in the Adriatic: extension to Trieste and risks of nullity and voidness

Referendum against oil drilling in the Adriatic:

extension to Trieste and risks of nullity and voidness

Referendum against oil drilling in the Adriatic: extension to Trieste and risks of nullity and voidness

On April 17th, 2017 Italy is holding a referendum about oil drilling.

Trieste, 18 March 2016. – Today (18.3) the Free Trieste Movement presented to the Commissar of the Italian Government in Trieste the formal request to extend also to the citizens of the present-day Free Territory of Trieste the right to vote in the Italian referendum to be held on 17 April about the search and extraction of hydrocarbons in the Adriatic sea (see annex, in English and in Italian).

The reason of this request is that the environmental risk connected to oil drilling in the Adriatic Italian national waters involve not only those of the Republics of Slovenia and of Croatia, but also the bordering territorial waters of the present-day Free Territory of Trieste, which is entrusted to the Italian Government under a mandate of temporary civil administration, exercised by that Commissar with appropriate special powers.

In order to allow the citizens of the entrusted Free Territory to vote, either the provisional Government or its Commissar should therefore issue a specific legislative act, because without that the vote of those citizens might give raise to the nullity and voidness of the referendum for breach of the constitutional and international legal obligations of the Italian Government and of the State of Italy towards the Free Territory of Trieste.

Free Trieste underlines that those are specific legal obligations in force, established with the Treaty of Peace with Italy of 10 February 1947 and with the Memorandum of Understanding of London of 5 October 1954, implemented in the Italian Constitutional legislation and confirmed by the United Nations with very recent document S/2015/809 of the Security Council and UN Secretariat.

The request is therefore sent, for information, also to the International Provisional Representative of the Free Territory of Trieste – I.P.R. F.T.T., to the Foreign Ministers of Slovenia and of Croatia, to international environmentalist organizations Alpe Adria Green and Greenpeace, as well as to the Italian Regional Councils that promote the referendum: Basilicata, Marche, Puglia, Sardegna, Abruzzo, Veneto, Calabria, Liguria, Campania and Molise.

Press Office of the Free Trieste Movement

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