Kurdish Minister denounces Federal Court's ruling to abolish quota seats as "political and illegal"

Shafaq News / The KRG Minister of State for Minority Affairs, Aydin Maruf, said on Thursday that the decision of the Federal Supreme Court to dissolve the 'quota' seats in the Kurdistan Parliament is "political and illegal."

Maruf stated in a press conference, attended by Shafaq News Agency, "the KRI minorities will take part in the Kurdistan Regional Parliament elections to protect their rights, in response to this unfair, political, and illegal decision."

Furthermore, The Chaldean-Assyrian-Turkmen-Syriac components in the Kurdistan Region denounced, on Wednesday, the Federal Supreme Court's decision to abolish the "quota" seats in the Kurdistan Parliament as "a constitutional coup".

On Wednesday, the Federal Supreme Court, Iraq's top judicial authority, made several rulings on the Kurdistan Parliament's election law, and declared the Kurdistan Region parliament's 11 minority seats "unconstitutional". It said the parliament has only 100 members, not 111 as before.

Noteworthy, the Kurdish election law, enacted in 1992 and revised in 2013, was challenged in the Iraqi federal court for being unconstitutional. The court consolidated the cases because of their similarity.

The law allocated 11 out of 111 seats in the legislature for minorities: five for Turkmen, with Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Armenians each having one seat.

The federal court replaced the Independent High Electoral and Referendum Commission of the Kurdistan Region with Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) to manage the Region's elections, following its ruling that the parliament's term extension was unconstitutional. IHEC will supervise the elections until a new parliament establishes its own regional commission.