21 Jul 2014

Electoral process casting doubt on Fiji elections

4:33 am on 21 July 2014

The Fiji Labour Party says no one can have any confidence in the National Register of Voters because the government has decided to not make it public.

It says in March this year the regime slipped in a change via Decree 9 that removed the requirement to publish the National Register and a registered voter's right to object to the names registered in it.

The Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry says they only discovered the change recently.

He says the Register could contain thousands of bogus voters but it won't be possible to flush them out because the government is not obliged to publish it.

"One can only access his or her own information nobody else's, it's now become a secret document, accessible only to the state and of course in this particular case, to the state, maybe to the Fiji First party, to the exclusion of all other political parties and registered voters."

Mahendra Chaudhry questions how the international community can continue to believe that the September polls will be free, fair and credible.