Direct democracy

The Tijana Juric Foundation, an organisation named after a murdered teen and which campaigns for the safety of children in Serbia, is due to submit a petition on Thursday in support of giving life prison terms without parole for convicted killers of minors and pregnant women.

A petition is being launched in about 40 towns to introduce life sentence for those found guilty of raping and murdering children, minors, and pregnant women.

The initiative has been launched by the Tijana Juric Foundation - named after a 15-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered in 2014 - and requires at least 30,000 signatures to enter parliamentary procedure.

The Catalan government has announced that 90.9 percent of citizens who voted in Sunday's referendum on independence circled the option "yes."

The referendum, which is not recognized by Madrid, was marked by unrest.

Catalonia residents have begun to gather in front of the voting venues for the Sunday Independence Referendum, according to Reuters.

The vote was declared unconstitutional by the Madrid Supreme Court, but the regional authorities have expressed readiness to do so, despite all the government's efforts to prevent it.

The Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) has decided that the referendum initiated by Slavi Trifonov is not mandatory, reported BGNES.

The decision is final and is not subject to appeal or protest.

The pre-referendum period was particularly informative with regard to the state of journalism in Turkey, with widespread violations of ethical principles and with partisan journalism intertwined with politics.   

Turkey's main opposition party has vowed to take widespread irregularities during the April 16 referendum to the Constitutional Court and European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), repeating its accusations against the election watchdog and calling on the Supreme Election Board (YSK) to annul the referendum results.

Bulgarian authorities will have to take into account the decisions made in future national referendums if at least 3,682,151 people have taken part in these.

This is the number of people who voted in the snap parliamentary elections on March 26, announced the Central Election Commission on Thursday.

The Supreme Administrative Court has annulled the decision of the Central Election Commission (CEC) ruling that the referendum is null and void due to 12,027 missing votes.

The magistrates ruled that the commission did not count 490 valid votes, as proven by the expert commission appointed to investigate the case.

Bulgarian Chief Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov has spoken out against a move of the country's election authorities to declare "non-binding" a referendum on the election system of the country.

Turnout in the national poll, conducted in November, fell short of just over 12 000 votes that would have made its result obligatory.