Mozambique: Constitutional judges criminally liable for local election result – Renamo

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Mozambique: Constitutional judges criminally liable for local election result – Renamo

5:00 CAT | 06 Dec 2023

Screen grab: Venancio Mondlane / Facebook

The Renamo Party candidate, Mozambique’s main opposition party, in the local elections in Maputo, argued on Tuesday that the judges of the Constitutional Council should be held disciplinarily and criminally responsible for the judgement in which they validated and proclaimed the results of the ballot.

“In the Organic Law of the Constitutional Council there is a clause that states when a judge counsellor should cease to hold office before the end of his term and one of the reasons that can lead to a judge ceasing to hold office is when he acts outside his powers, he abuses his power, which can lead to disciplinary and criminal proceedings,” said Venâncio Mondlane, during another march through the streets of Maputo city, as part of the actions to contest the results of the local elections on 11 October.

Mondlane pointed to the lack of justification for the withdrawal of 30,000 votes from the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) and their distribution to the opposition, as well as the exercise of “reverification” of the results of the local elections evoked by the Constitutional Council (CC) as acts outside the competence of this body and which are therefore null and void.

“They used false information, false notices, exercised responsibilities that were not theirs, such as, for example, changing the results, the story of taking 30,000 votes from one party and putting them in another, these are administrative, operational responsibilities, they are not responsibilities of the Constitutional Council,” the politician emphasised.

“The action of the Constitutional Council (CC) is an action that has to do with what is called jurisdictional action, they act on procedures, on decisions that are taken,” he pointed out.

Venâncio Mondlane accused those who argue that judges cannot be held responsible for their decisions of schizophrenia – Renamo has already lodged a criminal complaint with the public prosecutor’s office to this effect – maintaining that even the country’s president is criminally responsible before the Supreme Court for acting outside the law in the exercise of his duties.

He added that the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) is “clarifying to the public” the decision to file a complaint with the public prosecutor against the CC magistrates.

On 24 November, the CC proclaimed Frelimo the winner of municipal elections in 56 municipalities, against the previous 64, with Renamo winning four, and ordered repeat elections in another four.

According to the unanimously approved ruling, Frelimo maintained its victory in the country’s two main cities, Maputo and Matola, where Renamo had claimed victory, despite cutting the total awarded to the ruling party by tens of thousands of votes.

The CC is the body of last resort in electoral justice with the power to validate elections in Mozambique.

The streets of some Mozambican cities, including Maputo, have been taken over by consecutive demonstrations by the opposition against what they consider to have been a “mega-fraud” in the local elections process and the results announced by the National Electoral Commission (CNE), which have also been strongly criticised by civil society and non-governmental organisations.

The Mozambique Bar Association (OAM) considers that the proclamation of the results of the local elections by the CC lacked justification and called for a review of the electoral legislation.

In a note dated 1 December, the OAM states that the CC “must exercise its powers of cognition, knowing the facts and the law”, and with that “giving reasons for its decisions, and cannot and should not limit itself to saying ‘the results were the result of the rechecking of the data, according to the evidence produced'”.

Source: Lusa