Africa-Press – Mozambique. A prominent Mozambican human rights activist, Wilker Dias, has called for reforming the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.
Wilker Dias, who is the director of the “Decide” Platform, an NGO that closely follows Mozambican elections, objected to the extraordinary claims by one Constitutional Council judge, Albano Macie, who claimed there were no real demonstrations after the announcement of the results from last year’s general elections – only a “failed insurrection”.
Speaking in Maputo on Monday, during a seminar marking the 50th anniversary of the country’s first constitution, Macie claimed that the only reason the alleged insurrection failed was that it had no support from the armed forces.
Interviewed by the German agency DW Africa, Dias said that Macie’s statements show that some of the courts “have been captured by partisan inclinations”.
“If we analyse them properly, the last elections were fraudulent, as were previous ones”, said Dias. “This is a cycle that repeats itself, and brings its consequences”. Anyone who thinks the protests had nothing to do with the elections “shows that they are ignorant of the reality of the country”.
Reforming the Constitutional Council had become a major priority, said Dias. The Council “is not impartial, and does not do properly the job for which it was created in constitutional terms. These statements by the judge Macie show that there is an obvious need for reform”.
He did not suggest the shape of this reform, but the composition of the Constitutional Council is obviously a major headache, since it has a built-in majority favouring the ruling Frelimo Party. Five of the seven judges on the Council are elected by the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, but in proportion to the number of parliamentary seats held by each party.
Wilker Dias also noted that the Technical Commission in charge of what is supposed to be an “inclusive national dialogue” still has no representatives from civil society organisations. There are 18 members from political parties and three places have been left vacant for civil society.
But, if the political party representatives choose which civil society bodies will sit on the Commission, this “raises doubts about transparency”, said Dias. “Why not let civil society choose directly its members for the three places?”
Dias regarded three places as clearly inadequate, given the large number of NGOs, religious bodies, academic institutions and other civil society bodies that exist in Mozambique. “It will be complicated to represent civil society with just three places”, he said.
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