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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Political parties representing ethnic and religious minorities in the Kurdistan Region are not happy with a recent Federal Court ruling that abolished their dedicated seats in the regional parliament.
“We trust that our brothers in the Federal Court are not against the minorities’ rights. By the will of God, this will be resolved soon,” Yonadam Kanna, head of the Christian al-Rafidain alliance, told Rudaw.
The Baghdad-based court on Wednesday ruled that the 11 quota seats in the Kurdistan Region’s parliament reserved for ethnic and religious minorities were “unconstitutional,” effectively rejecting the legitimacy of the seats.
“The Kurdistan Parliament consists of one hundred members,” read the court’s ruling on lawsuits filed by two politicians from the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (PUK) and a Christian party in Sulaimani against the Kurdistan Region’s election law.
The lawsuits claimed that several articles of the election law were unconstitutional, including Article 36 which stipulates that 11 of the legislature’s 111 seats are dedicated to minorities under a quota system. In accordance with this law, Turkmen have five seats, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs have five, and Armenians have one.
Kanna said that without the minority quota seats, they will not participate in the upcoming election.
“We will not participate, because our numbers are hundreds of thousands, while the others are in the millions. Certainly, there is not an equal opportunity to compete as Article 16 [of the Iraqi constitution] requires,” he said. Article 16 says that the state shall ensure that equal opportunities are guaranteed for all Iraqis.
“We will continue to struggle to correct the mistakes. These mistakes are a violation of the rights of the minorities,” Kanna added.
Kanna estimates there are an estimated 150,000 Christians in the Kurdistan Region, but there are no official statistics as the country has not conducted a population census for decades.
Parliamentarians in the minority seats are often criticized for not being the true agents of the populations they represent, but are co-opted by the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Azad Ahmad Kurachi, a former Turkmen MP in the Kurdistan Region parliament, told Rudaw that those accusations are not true and his work during his tenure in the legislature shows that he was a true representative of the Turkmens.
“I have collected my projects in the parliament in a book. There are 126 projects. Let those who consider themselves true representatives, if they have been active, collect their projects in that way,” he said.
According to Kurachi, the Kurdish parties have not sat down with them to discuss the election law and possible amendments to it. “If they want our rights, then they should have taken our opinion,” he said.
Arez Abdullah, a member of the PUK leadership council, told Rudaw on Friday that his party has demanded that the Turkmens from the southern Sulaimani town of Kifri, Erbil, and Duhok as well as Christians in Sulaimani all have representation in the parliament and not all of them be placed in a specific area or electoral constituency.
Kurachi contested this saying “If the PUK is not against the minority rights, let them give the Turkmens five percent of the seats in the parliament to the minorities.”
The Turkmen parties are yet to decide how they will participate in the upcoming elections according to Kurachi.
Abdullah said that his party “did not know how the Federal Court would rule” and that the PUK’s opinion “might be different” from that of the court.
However, “in the end, the Federal Court’s ruling is final, and we accept it,” Abdullah said.
One of the PUK’s main criticisms of the minority quota seats was that the number of allocated seats was “unfair and illegal,” Abdullah noted.
“In principle, a quota seat is for those nations that cannot win a seat in the parliament,” he said. “You cannot allocate five seats for a minority, since if their seats become five, it is no longer a minority quota.”
He suggested that the minorities can participate in the election with “their own lists, or form alliances with other political parties and have candidates among parties such as the KDP and the PUK.”
Khalil Ibrahim, the spokesperson for the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), an opposition party with five seats in the previous term of the parliament, told Rudaw that his party agreed with all the federal court rulings, “apart from removing the minority quota seats.”
Regarding the participation of the minorities in the polls, Ibrahim noted that they were “free to decide whether to participate on their own list, forming alliances, or participate within other parties’ lists,” and called on Kurdish parties to “accommodate” minorities in their electoral lists.
The date for the Kurdistan Region’s delayed parliamentary elections is yet to be determined. On Tuesday, delegations from Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) met with the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Kurdistan Region Presidency. In the meeting, June was suggested as a date for the vote, Rudaw learned.
Updated at 9:03 pm
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