Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

Close to an End to Crisis Around Parliamentary Election

President Hamid Karzai has issued a decree to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to come up with a final decision on the lingering controversies and disputes about the last year parliamentary elections. The parliamentary election was held on September 18, 2010. Many domestic and international observers have maintained that this election was better than the presidential election held in 2009, whose credibility also came to question after more than one million votes were chucked out as fraudulent.

But unfortunately president Karzai refused to accept the decision of IEC on parliamentary election as the final. He issued a decree to establish a Special Election Court to look into frauds and come up with a decision that could overturn the IEC's announcement of final results, which lacked any constitutional and legal base and thus contributed to a stalemate between the three branches of power for almost last one year.

While Afghanistan faces many daunting problems and challenges, the three branches of government have been at loggerheads over this issue. IEC has been resisting any pressure by the government and president to change the result or accept the verdict of an illegally established tribunal that did not go through a transparent process of recount before announcing its ruling to unseat 62 MP's and replace them with another 62 failed candidates, some of whom were not even on the IEC's list of possible winners.

President Karzai's Wednesday's decree shows that he wants the IEC to run the show and take the final decision. A presidential spokesman Siamak Herawi has said that the IEC will evaluate the Special Election Tribunal's findings and will decide if any candidates should be removed, adding "Based on the national interest of the country, Karzai has said that all those documents and evidence will be passed to the IEC.

He gave the IEC authority to make a final decision." Abdullah Ahmadzai, the chief electoral officer at the IEC has said "This is mainly a decree to finalize, or put an end, to this issue." He said that the commission hopes to finish making rulings within the next week.

It is hoped that the IEC continues its commitment to people's votes and announce its final decision soon as it is certain that the Special Court, which had no technical capacity, could not find anything that had escaped the IEC attention, which has the improved capacity and all the technical tools to separate the fraudulent votes.