ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The leader of a Christian party in the Kurdistan Region on Wednesday said he will file a complaint requesting for separate voting for minorities in the upcoming parliament elections, after his earlier complaint was accepted by Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council. A ruling by Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council on Monday allocated five seats for minorities in the Kurdistan Region’s parliament after a previous top court ruling in February stripped the 11 quota seats in the legislature reserved for ethnic and religious minorities on the grounds of being “unconstitutional”. The five seats will be within the allocated 100 for the parliament. The decision was in response to a complaint filed by Yousif Yacoub Matti, head of the Bethnahrain Patriotic Union, a Christian party that along with other minority parties said they would boycott the upcoming Kurdistan parliamentary elections. Matti told Rudaw on Wednesday that he will file another complaint to request for special voting status for minorities, to ensure that only minority communities can vote for their candidates. “The decision does not contain several details which are procedures that the [electoral] commission will take, including the distribution of minority seats, which must be fair, in addition to the lack of special voting for minorities,” Matti said. “We will file a complaint with the [Independent High Electoral] Commission on Sunday next week, regarding these two points to express our opposition,” he stressed, with minorities in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq having long called for the restriction of voting for their candidates. IHEC spokesperson Jumana al-Ghalai told Rudaw that Erbil and Sulaimani will each receive one seat for the Christian and Turkmen components, while Duhok’s seat will be given to the Armenians. Following the court ruling in February, a coalition of six Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christian parties blamed the Kurdistan Region’s ruling parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - as responsible for the Iraqi federal court decision to strip minority quota seats as they exploited the quota for their own benefit. The Christian parties blamed the KDP and PUK for failing to “protect and preserve” the 11 seats by refusing to restrict voting within the ethnic and religious components. Lawmakers from the minority quota in the Kurdish and Iraqi parliaments are often criticized for not being the true faces of the populations they represent but rather agents of ruling parties. Winning minority candidates with external party affiliations often receive tens of thousands of votes from districts in which the community has very minimal to no presence in, as big parties often mobilize scores of loyalists to tip these candidates over the line. Srud Maqdasy, a former Kurdistan MP from Erbil’s Christian-majority district of Ankawa, told Rudaw English in late February that a special voting status should exist for Christians and other minorities so that only they could vote for their candidates, in accordance with the Kurdistan Parliament Election Law 1 of 1992. “We were calling for that – elections where only minorities can vote for minority candidates to ensure fair representation,” Maqdasy said at the time.
