Assembleia da República (AR), o parlamento moçambicano
Maputo, 6 Jun (AIM) – Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi has refused to promulgate the amendments to the electoral laws that the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, passed on 30 April.
According to a report in the independent newssheet “Carta de Mocambique”, Nyusi sent the package of amendments back to the Assembly on 30 May. Throughout May Nyusi had supposedly been examining whether the amendments were in line with the Mozambican Constitution.
Nyusi’s decision is all the more surprising because the amendments were approved unanimously by the Assembly. All the deputies of Nyusi’s own party, the ruling Frelimo Party, had backed them.
A note from Nyusi’s office to the Assembly, said the President had doubts about the “procedural mechanism” for applying the amendments.
The key issue is the role of district and city courts in annulling elections and in demanding recounts. One amendment states that, in the event of an electoral dispute, the district court may order a recount.
Another amendment states “when irregularities occur in any polling station which endanger the freedom and transparency of the election, the district court, the National Elections Commission or the Constitutional Council, depending on the case, may order a recount of the votes at the polling stations where the irregularities took place”.
During last year’s municipal elections, several district courts saw that fraud had been committed, and either cancelled the elections in certain polling stations or ordered recounts. But in every case the Constitutional Council overruled the lower courts.
The Council usurped the power of district and city courts and ruled that only it had the power to annul elections or order recounts.
This reduced the role of courts in elections to a purely decorative function, which was certainly not what the Assembly had in mind when the election laws were originally passed. So in April the Assembly politely rebuffed the Constitutional Council, and restored the right of district courts to annul elections and order recounts.
Clearly this infuriated the Council which, in a training seminar for journalists last month, once again demanded the exclusive right over whether elections should be annulled.
Nyusi has now come down on the side of the Constitutional Council. Unlike the district courts, the majority of members of the Council were appointed by Frelimo.
The Frelimo parliamentary group must now decide whether to bend to Nyusi’s will, or stick to its unanimous position of April.
The Assembly is not in session, and it seems unlikely that an emergency parliamentary sitting can be held prior to the general elections scheduled for 9 October.
(AIM)
Pf/ (432)
