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Political Party Registration

EC to impose new conditions

Shakhawat Liton
The Election Commission has opted for imposing new conditions on political parties to retain their registration but made no move to develop any mechanism to enforce the criterion effectively.
A proposal drafted by the EC says a political party may lose its registration if it does not have a functional central office
and a central committee and effective offices in at least one-third districts. Besides, each party should have committees in at least one hundred upazilas or metropolitan thanas having a minimum number of200 voters as members in each committee.
It is one of the EC's proposals drafted for bringing changes in the
Representation of the People Order (RPO), insiders said, adding, the EC however did not draft any proposal to empower itself to monitor if the registered political parties are following the laws.
EC officials observed that only imposing new conditions on political parties for retaining registration may not yield positive result if there is no mechanism to enforce them.
They said the new conditions would just be added to the already existing criteria for having and retaining registration with no impact.
As per the current conditions, a political party may lose its registration if it does not have any provision in its constitution to elect members of the committees at all levels and fix the goal of reserving at least 33 percent posts for women in all committees and gradually achieve this goal by2020.
The parties are also prohibited from forming any organisation or body as affiliated or associated body consisting of teachers or students of any educational institution or employees or labourers of any financial, commercial or industrial institution or establishment or members of any other profession.
The EC could not oversee whether the registered political parties are complying with the conditions thanks to lack of any mech-anism.
As a result, the commission remained silent even when political parties, particularly the ruling Awami League and the main opposition BNR had refrained
from holding elections to form their central committees ignoring their charters and the RPO.
Talking to The Daily Star, Election Commissioner Shah Nawaz has however recendy said, "There is an ambiguity in the law. It only speaks of elections to form committees but nothing about the election process."
He blamed the last EC for the ambiguity saying the electoral reforms were done with their initiatives and during their tenure.
The major electoral reforms including political parties' registration system were brought with the initiative of the immediate past EC led by ATM Shamsul Huda.
Information available shows the Huda-led EC moved to legally empower the commission to monitor whether registered political parties were following the registration conditions in electing their leadership.
But taking part in the electoral talks with the EC twice at the end of2007 and early 2008, the AL strongly opposed the proposal.
A split of its arch-rival BNP that took part in the talks with the EC in April 2008 made the same response.
Therefore, the EC had to drop its proposal.
In the face of opposition from the AL and BNR the EC had to drop another proposal for introduction of a direct and secret ballot for electing party leadership to encourage intraparty democracy.
Since then both the proposals were not even discussed during the latest move to bring electoral reforms.