KRG awaits the Federal Court's official letter to respond to new election decisions

Shafaq News / The Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, Masrour Barzani, stated on Thursday that his government would announce its stance on the Federal Court's rulings about the elections in Kurdistan after "receiving them officially."

On Wednesday, the Federal Supreme Court, Iraq's top judicial authority, made several rulings on the Kurdistan Parliament's election law and declared the Kurdistan Region parliament's 11 minority seats "unconstitutional." It said the parliament has only 100 members, not 111 as before.

During a visit to Halabja to assess the situation of the people there and lay the foundation stone for the strategic "Towequt" bridge project, Barzani said at a press conference, "We would not accept anything that violated the constitutional rights of the Kurdish people."

Furthermore, he stressed, "We agreed that the elections should have been held on time, but they were postponed for two years for political reasons," emphasizing that "it is better to hold the elections as soon as possible."

Noteworthy, the Kurdish election law, enacted in 1992 and revised in 2013, was challenged in the Iraqi federal court for being unconstitutional. The court consolidated the cases because of their similarity.

The law allocated 11 out of 111 seats in the legislature for minorities: five for Turkmen, with Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Armenians each having one seat.

The federal court replaced the Independent High Electoral and Referendum Commission of the Kurdistan Region with Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) to manage the Region's elections, following its ruling that the parliament's term extension was unconstitutional. IHEC will supervise the elections until a new parliament establishes its own regional commission.

Earlier this week, the Kurdish presidency and government expressed "full readiness" to hold the parliamentary elections in the Region.

In August, the President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Nechirvan Barzani, issued a regional decree calling for the holding of the sixth Kurdistan Parliament elections on February 25, 2024.

However, the federal election Commission requested to postpone the date for "technical reasons".