Court Trashes CPP’s Petition to Probe NEC over Biometric Voters Registration- Latest Liberian News
Monrovia- The Supreme Court of Liberia has trashed the Collaborating Political Parties’ petition requesting the High Court to Probe the Constitutionality of the National Election Commission just ended the Biometric Voters Registration Process.
Giving the Court’s opinion on Wednesday, April 12,2023 Chief Justice Sie-Nyene G. Yuoh said the court found no reason to disturb the ongoing registration exercise.
Chief Justice Yuoh noted that the National Election Commission is not in violation of the constitutional provision regarding Articles 80 D and E.
Article 80[D] of the constitution states that “Each constituency shall have an approximately equal population of 20,000, or such number of citizens as the legislature shall prescribe in keeping with population growth and movements as revealed by a national census; provided that the total number of electoral constituencies in the Republic shall not exceed one hundred.
While section E, also state that Immediately following a national census and before the next election, the Elections Commission shall reapportion the constituencies the new population figures so that every constituency shall have as close to the same population as possible; provided, however, that a constituency must be solely within a county.
The high court chief judge further said that while the NCE has a duty under article 80 E] to reapportion constituencies the said duty is not self–executing.
The Supreme Court maintained that the duty to reapportion constituencies can only be executed based upon the preconditions that a national census report be concluded and submitted to the legislature.
Recently, the Collaborating Political Parties in early March petitioned the Supreme Court to probe the constitutionality of the national elections commission’s ongoing Biometric Voter registrations without the demarcating constitutional electoral constituency.
The Supreme Court then reserved a ruling on the petition filed by the Collaborating Political Parties against the National Election Commission.
In their petition, the CPP argued that NEC is violating Articles 80 C, D, and E of the 1986 Constitution for which reason they filed a petition asking the court to address the constitutionality of the NEC’s conduct of Voter Registration without the demarcation of the constitutional electoral constituency following the conduct of the national census.
At the time, they accused the electoral house of attempting to conduct Voter Registration in the absence of demarcated electoral districts.
The Supreme Court has also revealed that the legislature creates the threshold and then the NEC performs its duty to reapportion the constituencies under Article 80 E.
