Call for electoral body to ensure level playing field in Fiji

Transcript

The leader of Fiji's Labour Party says he plans on raising a number of issues with the Electoral Commission to try and ensure the promised elections won't be a whitewash.

The recently appointed commission has agreed to a meeting with political parties next week to discuss the election scheduled for September.

Mahendra Chaudhry says they still don't know how the elections will be conducted, and about 20 percent of eligible voters are yet to be registered.

He told Bridget Tunnicliffe as things stand now, the current regime has a huge advantage.

MAHENDRA CHAUDHRY: It's mainly that the electoral legislation is not ready as yet so we don't know exactly how the elections will be conducted, what will be the voting method and therefore voter education work is held up. We believe that the draft legislation done by the technical experts who were here from the EU, the New Zealand and Australian governments, wrote up the legislation and handed it to the attorney general's office some weeks back and they are now looking at it we are told. Then they will finalise the legislation before handing it to the Electoral Commission and promulgating it. Our concern there is that we'd like to see that these elections are held in conformity with the internationally accepted norms for free democratic elections and until such time as the legislation is out we will not be sure whether it complies with those internationally accepted norms. The other thing of course is the environment in which the elections are going to be held. As you know there are a number of draconian decrees here which severely restrict the right to freedom of association, assembly, and expression. The media still is not free and there are restrictions on political parties in terms of campaigning and in short we don't have a level playing field. These restrictions, which mind you contravene the Bill of Rights provisions of the constitution, should be removed and elections must be held in a free democratic environment.

BRIDGET TUNNICLIFFE: Do you think that things are running behind schedule then, you still don't have this key information about the elections which are meant to be held at the end of September.

MC: Well I think there's a lot of preparatory work that needs to be done before the elections can be certified to be free, fair and credible. We also have a problem about registration here, according to the Elections Office itself there are some 20 percent of the eligible voters who have yet to be registered, now that's a pretty high number. And at the moment the regime is dominating, prime minister Bainimarama has said that he is going to form his own party, he's been campaigning at public expense for a long time now, and he has a pitch over other political parties. Now will this situation prevail in the lead up to elections?

BT: Do you believe the Electoral Commission and its members can work without any interference by the government?

MC: Well this is again a matter of concern, as you know what happened to the Constitution Commission of Yash Ghai, they were brought in, given a piece of work to do, they did it, then the regime rejected it because they didn't like it so they wrote up their own constitution. We are justifiably concerned that this commission may suffer a similar fate.