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Zimbabwe: Presidential and general elections to be held by July 31 – Mugabe
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said on Sunday he will abide by a court ruling to hold crucial elections before the end of July despite objections from his rivals.
Mugabe told the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corp. traveling with him on trip to Japan he will convene polls “not later than July 31,” state radio reported.
The Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest court, on Friday chided Mugabe for not calling elections linked to the dissolution of the parliament at the end of its current five year term on June 29.
Mugabe traveled to Japan to attend an African development summit in Yokahama.
The opposition led by Morgan Tsvangirai’s party said Sunday that unless reforms to voters’ lists and the registration of new voters are in place before voting there will be doubt over whether conditions allowed for a free and fair election.
Those demands are written into a new constitution overwhelmingly accepted in a referendum in March, the party said.
Seven out of nine Constitutional Court judges ruled Friday that Mugabe violated his constitutional responsibilities by failing to declare polls by June 29.
But Judge Luke Malaba, in his dissenting opinion available on an official website Sunday, said his colleagues’ ruling “defied logic” in finding Mugabe was in breach of his constitutional responsibilities “and at the same time authorizing him to continue acting unlawfully” by proclaiming a July date. “That is a very dangerous principle and has no basis in law. The principle of the rule of law just does not permit such an approach,” wrote Malaba.
He said the new constitution makes it clear that elections can be held within four months of the automatic dissolution of the parliament on June 29 and to hold them in July compromises constitutional rights for the electorate as a whole “to play a meaningful role in the electoral process,” Malaba said.
A private lawsuit brought before the constitutional court to force Mugabe to call early polls turned clear and unambiguous language in the law into “a question of interpretation that plunged the court into irreconcilable differences.”
“I, however, refuse to have wool cast over the inner eye of my mind on this matter,” concluded Malaba.
Source: Associated Press