Political parties told to help with poll registers

Sanaa: The Yemen Supreme Committee on Elections and Referendum has warned political parties that it will work without them if they do not participate in forming the subcommittees to review electoral registers.

The seven-member SCER, the country's highest panel in charge of elections, is preparing for the presidential and local elections to be held in September.

The parties have been arguing about their representation in the SCER's subcommittees that will review the electoral registers.

Abdu Al Janadi, chairman of the media and awareness sector of SCER, said there is no more time for procrastination.

"The SCER is still has hope that the parties will reach a final agreement in their meeting," Al Janadi said earlier.

However, the meeting didn't take place after the opposition parties refused to hold the meeting.

"The invitation came too late, on the same day, and we were not informed of the topics and mechanism of the dialogue," said a statement issued by the six main oppostion parties known as the Joint Meeting Parties.

If they do not reach an agreement, he warned, the SCER will resort to its legal powers. It will form subcommittees with school teachers and university students or with job applicants at the ministry of civil service.

According to Al Janadi, the five parties, represented in Parliament, including the ruling party, had agreed to three criteria for distributing the subcommittees among them. But they are still in disagreement on one of them. The first is to give equal percentage (1%) to every party among the 22 licensed parties.

The second criterion was on the basis of votes obtained by each party in the last parliamentary elections in 2003. The SCER official confirmed that the parties agreed on 72% of the subcommittees on the basis of these two criteria.

The disagreement, however, was on the remaining 28%, the third criterion which was on the basis of representation in the House of Representatives.

The ruling People's General Congress, which has 230 seats out of the 301-member house, insists on distributing the subcommittees on the basis of the number of seats.

While the four opposition parties: Islah, (46 seats), Yemen Socialist Party (7 seats), Unionist Nasserite (3 seats) and Socialist Baath party (1 seat) want to distribute the 28 % on the basis of the representation criterion regardless of the number of seats.

The opposition parties say the PGC wants the majority of the subcommittees in the light of its votes and seats. But opposition adheres to the law which prevents appointment of two members from one party in any subcommittee (subcommittee consists of three members) to ensure the principle of political competition and technical neutrality.

According to recent statistics there are 1.5 million new eligible voters to be registered.

Current system hits smaller groups

A recent study has shown that Yemen's present election system "first winner" (who gets the highest number of votes) prevents the opposition from winning dozens of seats and excludes many small parties from a role in the House of Representatives.

The study, conducted by member of parliament Dr Mohammad Saleh Ali, called the parties and civil society to work for adopting the "relative list" (proportional list ) system which reduces the gap between the number of votes obtained by a party and the number of its seats in the House.

- The writer is a journalist based in Sanaa