2020.03.15_Dejan Saveski PhD – ‘Procedural unconstitutionality and illegality of the Prespa agreement’, Split (pdf)

Вероучение - Поука 03

The Prespa Agreement signed on June 17, 2018, which changed the constitutional name of the
Republic of Macedonia, is a precedent on international law. In the procedure of his conclusion,
ratification, and execution were committed serious violations of procedural rules. Although the
violations that this agreement produces are numerous, and with different nature, the focus of this
paper is on procedural violations. The Prespa Agreement also has a lot of substantial mistakes which
is in confrontation with the Constitutional, and the international law because the Prespa Agreements
provisions derogate some essentially fundamental rights as a right of self-determination. But this
paper is focused only on fundamental violations of legal norms that prescribes the procedure for
promulgation of the Prespa Agreement – the process of negotiation, conclusion, ratification, and
publishing. The process of negotiating, signing and ratifying the Prespa Agreement is followed
by flagrant violations of the constitutional norms, statute norms, and the norms of the Vienna
Convention on the Law of Treaties in the part that regulates the issue of persons who was competence
for adopting an authenticating the text of a treaty. Besides the introductory part and historical
introduction to the genesis of the problem, the focus of this paper is the procedure of negotiating,
concluding, and ratifying the Prespa Agreement. The procedural aspects of the referendum on the
Prespa Agreement will be elaborate in the part called “negotiation and conclusion of international
agreement” because, by the time being, this referendum was issue notice after the conclusion phase
and before ratification.