MPs should participate in monitoring detainees’ voting – lawmaker

MPs should participate in monitoring detainees’ voting – lawmak BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: A Sunni lawmaker on Monday called on Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) to allow Parliament, local council members, and civil society organizations to monitor the voting process inside Iraqi and U.S. jails. “The presence of legislators and provincial council members as well as representatives of civil society organizations will give more transparency to the voting which is scheduled to be held for detainees inside Iraqi and U.S. prisons on January 28,” Hashim al-Tai’e, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front (IAF), said in a statement received by IraqiNews.com news agency. “This should put an end to accusations and rumors, particularly when the observers are from the concerned province,” Tai’e said in the statement issued by the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP). The IHEC had set Jan. 28 for taking the votes of policemen and army personnel, hospital inmates and detainees during the provincial council elections, expected to be held on Jan. 31 in 14 Iraqi provinces except Kirkuk and the three provinces of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region. “The IAF bloc, including the IIP, have left no stone unturned in defending the rights of detainees and calling for their release,” he said, adding some of the results of these efforts is the adoption of general pardon law and visits to prisons. The IAF, a political coalition of Sunni parties formed on October 26, 2005, is now encompassing Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi’s IIP and IAF leader Adnan al-Dulaimi’s Iraq People’s Congress (IPC). The bloc, the third largest in the Iraqi parliament, occupies 27 out of a total 275. AmR (S)/SR 2