Disagreement over who should vote in New Caledonia

Transcript

There are strong disagreements in New Caledonia over who should be allowed to vote in next month's provincial election.

Voting will be restricted to long-term residents in line with the decolonisation process which, after the election, opens the way for a possible independence referendum.

The interpretation of these rules has been the subject of legal challenges.

Walter Zweifel has been following the dispute and Amelia Langford asked him how the problem has arisen.

WALTER ZWEIFEL: Voting rights are enshrined in the 1998 Noumea Accord on greater autonomy which is New Caledonia's road map after its troubles of the 1980s. It stipulates that only people who had become residents before 1998 are allowed to vote. This restriction of voting rights for French citizens was enshrined in the constitution in 2007. There was seemingly little attention paid to the adjusted rolls until earlier this year when the pro-independence FLNKS Movement stunned the public by saying it wanted 6,700 names struck off.

AMELIA LANGFORD: Who is dealing with such a request?

WZ: Special committees were set up to vet the rolls that included magistrates from France's highest court but more importantly also include representatives from the political parties. When these committees found no basis to purge any names, the FLNKS decided to take court action. And so it flooded the tribunals with thousands of cases which were dealt with last week.

AL: What did the tribunals say?

Interestingly, in Noumea, where most people live, the FLNKS largely failed to remove any names while in Kone the tribunal eliminated most names of people who the FLNKS says should not be allowed to vote. The difference seems to be that in Noumea, the tribunal insisted that the onus is on the FLNKS to prove that a person arrived after 1998 or that the person wasn't enrolled properly. An academic, Mathias Chauchat, who has been advising the Congress president on legal aspects, warned last week that this could provoke a judicial scandal. He said the FLNKS is denied access to the relevant records which are only open to the judges, the mayor and the French high commissioner. According to him, this could mean that people who should be struck off could stay on the roll because those who can check the facts refuse to do so.

AL: Where to now in what seems to be a messy affair?

WZ: It's likely that there will be appeals to France's highest court but they won't be heard for months. And remember, the election is due on May the 11th, which means that the election result may be challenged, depending on how the courts decide. Those who are strongly opposed to the idea of removing anyone from the list, which is in essence the loyalist camp, say what the FLNKS has been doing is putting 25 years of peace is at risk. The FLNKS says it only signed the Noumea Accord to get guarantees that migrants to New Caledonia wouldn't render them a minority in their homeland.