Joint Parliamentary Committees Schedule New Session Next Week
The joint parliamentary committees tasked with drafting an electoral law postponed Thursday's session, that was scheduled primarily to discuss the hybrid electoral draft-law, until June 1 after the withdrawal of MP Ali Ammar.
MP Ali Fayyad said after the meeting that “Ammar's withdrawal had to do with the agenda of the meeting.”
The interlocutors were supposed to tackle the hybrid law after they rejected, in a meeting last week, both the 1960s electoral law and the proportional law.
Hizbullah MP Fayyad said: “We are addressing the issue with openness. But what surprises us is the emphasis claiming that the electoral law is a political issue, which is not permissible since a political nature would affect the objectivity of the law.”
For his part, Free Patriotic Movement MP Alain Aoun said: “The only solution for an electoral law is to agree on single standards no matter what the results were,” stressing that it is impossible to reach a solution if each party does what suits it best.
Lebanese Forces MP Georges Adwan meanwhile noted that “a return to the 1960s law is considered a crime against all the Lebanese.
“We are not far away from reaching a common ground,” he assured.
Deputy Speaker Farid Makari scheduled a new session on June 1, and said: “We have agreed not to go backwards and study the mechanism that was taken to discuss the electoral law.”
Differences linger between political parties over the 1960s and proportional representation draft-laws.
Speaker Nabih Berri had proposed that the term of parliament be shortened and that an agreement be reached over a new electoral law.
The 1960s law will be adopted should the parties fail to agree on a new one.
He also suggested that the parliamentary polls will be followed by the election of a new president and later the formation of a national unity government.
Disagreements between the rival political powers over an electoral law forced parliament to twice extend its own term, once in 2013 and another time in 2014.
Its term ends in June 2017.
Source: Naharnet
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