Malawi’s Constitutional Court judges were Tuesday named winners of a concocted award for overturning a presidential election where there was no proven rigging.
The London-based think-tank Chatham House forget Malawi is an independent country and does not need approval from London or anyone else. Instead of lauding the five corrupted judges for bravery and independence after they canceled the re-election of then incumbent Peter Mutharika in a historic decision for elections in Africa, they should have questioned why a case without merit saw the light of day.
According to AP reporting, the so-called Chatham House Prize is annually awarded for “the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations.”
What International relations did the partisan judges improve?
Past winners have included British conservationist David Attenborough, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also called Doctors Without Borders.
someone should remind the brits Malawi is now independent and does not seek accolades from our colonial master. Shameful indeed
The five corrupt constitutional judges in February dramatically annulled the 2019 presidential vote result over what they characterized as “widespread, systematic, and grave irregularities.”
Backing the opposition, many of them related to Lazarus Chakwera, they ordered new illegal elections, which were held on June 23 and won by opposition leader, their favored candidate Lazarus Chakwera.
Chatham House director Robin Niblett said, “the Malawi ruling is unprecedented in a country where past elections have been marred by irregularities, electoral fraud and violence.”
What does he know about Malawi elections to make such nonsensical statements? As Malawians cannot allow ourselves to be used by foreigners for whatever their reasons.
David Phiri a Malawians legal expert based in Geneva said ConCourt Judges’ reasoning was questionable. In the same vein of judicial arrogance, these five Judges opined that Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) should not have delegated their judicial function of resolving electoral disputes. There are 5002 Polling Centres throughout the country from where most, if not all, electoral disputes are generated and must be resolved. In standard practice, this has mostly been done by Presiding Officers, who represent MEC at these Polling sites. It is unreasonable, not to mention absurd, to rule that nine Commissioners must personally resolve disputes whenever they occur at these 5002 Polling Centres.
The petitioners who brought the claim that Constituency Tally Centres (CTC) were used to rig the election, left out the crucial fact that they themselves, along with civil society, had lobbied for such centres in 2017. Therefore, the CTC was created by all stakeholders who included MEC, Political Parties, Security agents, Observers, NGOs, etc. These CTCs were an administrative innovation intended to complement the District Tally Centres (DTCs), which had never been replaced.
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The ramifications of the ConCourt Judges’ stupefying ruling do not end there. Section 67(1) of the Constitution requires MPs to be elected every five years. In Section 80(1), the MPs must be elected concurrently with the President. Meanwhile, the five Judges ordered the Election of the President to take place following a 13 and a half months’ interval; so, the fresh Presidential Election will not to be done concurrently with the election of MPs as Section 80(1) requires. Instead, the five Judges then ordered that the election of MPs be held after a 6-year interval. To muddle issues further, they brazenly went on to order Parliament to make amendments to the Constitution and other Electoral Laws in order to legalize and sanitize the constitutional and legal confusions they had created.
Unfortunately for them, Parliament failed to make the Constitutional Amendments, which would have retrospectively legalized their misjudgments. The plain fact is it does not happen that way anywhere in the world. Judges do not make orders based on laws that need to be amended to make the judgment legal. In the end, Parliament ended up making Amendments to the Electoral Laws that conflicted with the Constitutional provisions.
In conclusion, the record must reflect that at no point in their 500-page Judgement did the Judges point at any faults or wrongdoing by President Mutharika. Yet they stripped him of his victory and worse still, condemned him to pay court costs while they awarded the Petitioners these court costs. By no stretch of the imagination can the conduct of these Judges be consistent with discharging justice or with the operation of the Law. It is not the normal judicial process; at least not as we know it. In the current climate, the truth is an inconvenience and so it is understandable why it has been the first casualty in our political conflicts.
Shame on Chatham House, you can take your award and shove it.
