District courts stripped of power to order recounts

Maputo, 9 Aug (AIM) – The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Thursday voted for amendments to the electoral legislation which remove district and city law courts from any recounting of votes which might frustrate electoral fraud.

Last year, during the municipal elections, several district courts, using powers which they believe they enjoyed under the law, annulled elections or ordered recounts.

But the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, threw out all these lower court decisions, and declared that only it had the power to annul elections or order recounts.

This reduced the role of district courts to little more than window dressing.

The Assembly worked on amending the electoral legislation so that it could include a consensual position on the role of the courts. On 30 April, the Assembly unanimously passed an amendment which, while denying the courts the right to take decisions that would annul elections, said the courts could order recounts in the event of discrepancies.

All three parliamentary groups backed this position. It was agreed by the ruling Frelimo Party and the opposition Renamo and Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM).

The bill containing the amendments was sent to President Filipe Nyusi to be promulgated and published. Nyusi waited for almost a month, and then exercised his veto. Rather than promulgate the bill, he sent it back to the Assembly for “re-examination”.

Nyusi said he wanted “clarification” about the mechanism to be used for recounts.

Rather than stick with the previous, consensual position, the Frelimo parliamentary group crumbled before Nyusi’s opposition to court-ordered recounts.

More surprisingly, the Renamo parliamentary group agreed with Frelimo to remove the paragraphs under which courts could order recounts. Only the MDM stuck to its guns and insisted that the courts must be allowed to decide whether irregularities were serious enough to justify recounts.

So only the four MDM deputies present in the room voted against the new amendment, while the 200 Frelimo and Renamo deputies voted in favour.

As a result of this parliamentary decision, the only bodies that can order recounts in the general elections scheduled for 9 October are the National Elections Commission (CNE) and the Constitutional Council, which are both dominated by Frelimo.

(AIM)

Pf/ (381)