Iraqi court rejects challenges to manual recount of parliament votes

Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Iraq’s top court has turned down challenges to recent parliament-introduced amendments to the elections law which involved adoption of manual recount of votes for the latest parliamentary polls.

Iyad al-Samouk, a spokesperson of the court, said the court held a session on Wednesday to consider challenges to the amendments approved last week, and decided not to accept the challenges.

Iraqi parliament elections have been surrounded with suspicions of forgery, with many parties objecting to the electronic counting system adopted for the first time in the country’s history, and demanding a manual recount.

The government has laid blame on the High Elections Commission that supervised the polls.

The parliament has also decided to replace the commission’s judges, with the High Judicial Council inducting new members on Monday.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said Tuesday that neither the government nor the parliament had the right to cancel the results of elections.

In a speech during the weekly conference on Tuesday, Abadi said the Supreme Court was the only authority that has the right to decide if the elections should take place again.

According to official results of the elections held on May 12th, Abadi’s al-Nasr list came third. First came Saeroon list, sponsored by Shia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist seeking to break away from Iranian influence and scathingly opposed to foreign military presence in Iraq. Second came al-Fatah, an alliance of former leaders of the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, the Shia-led troops that backed government forces campaign, under Abadi, to drive out Islamic State militants since 2014.