Venezuela's prison services minister denounces prisoners' signing for recall referendum

Venezuela's Prison Services Minister Iris Varela said on Sunday that she would make a legal complaint against prisoner signatures in the application forms for a presidential recall referendum.

Venezuela is now witnessing a recall referendum driven by the local opposition against President Nicolas Maduro.

However, after auditing the signatures presented by the opposition coalition in early May, the National Electoral Council found that signatures of 11,000 deceased people and 1,335 prisoners were on the list, which were obvious irregularities.

"I am going to remove this (the prisoners signatures) from the list and I am going to personally lodge a (legal) complaint in the name of the ministry that I represent," Varela told local media.

Referring to the prisoner signatures, Varela said that "those people, as they are serving sentences, couldn't participate in the signature collecting process for the referendum, neither physically nor legally."

She assured that during the process of verifying over 2 million signatures, which was part of the first phase of the recall referendum process, some of the witnesses were appointed by the opposition.

In the Latin American country, to open a referendum needs signatures from 1 percent of the electorate.

A presidential recall took place in Venezuela in 2004, when the parliament voted to decide whether to remove President Hugo Chavez (1999-2013) from the post. Chavez survived the recall attempt as 59.1 percent voted in his favor. Endi