Maputo, 25 Oct (AIM) – The Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, has overruled the Chokwe district court, in the southern province of Gaza, which had annulled the elections to the Chokwe municipal assembly held on 11 October.
The Council’s ruling, dated 23 October, makes it clear that only the Council, and no lower courts, can annul elections and order a repetition. So there will be no repeat of the Chokwe municipality – unless the Council itself decides that the election was fatally flawed, and that can only happen after the National Elections Commission (CNE) has delivered its final results, which is supposed to happen no later than Thursday.
The Council found that the Chokwe District Election Commission (CDE) broke the electoral law by failing to issue accreditation for poll monitors of one of the minor opposition parties, New Democracy (ND).
The CDE’s excuse was that the ND’s list of poll monitors included some of the same people who were running for seats on the municipal assembly. The CDE regarded this as a “conflict of interest”.
But this conflict was invented by the CDE and does not exist in the electoral legislation. There is nothing in law to prevent people from being both candidates for a municipal assembly, and monitors stationed at the polling stations.
This ban on the ND monitors, the council ruled, ‘called into question the principle of electoral transparency in the 11 October elections in the city of Chókwè’, and the Council regarded this as illegal.
The illegality of the failure to issue credentials to the ND monitors will be considered again “during the phase of the validation of the election results”. Only then will the Council consider whether the illicit ban on the ND monitors had a significant impact on the elections.
A second Council ruling indirectly upheld the decision of the court in the Maputo municipal district of Nhlamankulo to annul the municipal election in that district.
The ruling threw out the appeal against the court decision by the Nhlamankulo District Elections Commission. This was largely because the appeal did not come from the full Commission, but only from its chairperson.
The Council noted that the chairperson did not show any decision from the Commission giving her powers to lodge an appeal.
The chairperson, it said, had no legal standing because she would not have been harmed by the ‘execution of the judgment’. For the Council, only those who ‘have been harmed by the delivery or execution of the judgment’ have the standing to appeal, which the Nhlamankulu Commission ‘is unable to demonstrate in its legal sphere, as a defender of the public interest of justice, transparency, impartiality and electoral legality’.
This does not necessarily mean that the court’s order to repeat the election in 64 polling stations will go ahead. Instead, the Council will deal with it when it receives from the CNE the full results for validation.
(AIM)
Pf/ (494)
