Baghdad - Iraqi lawmakers on Monday approved an amended version of the country's elections law and sent it back to the Iraqi presidency for approval. The decision followed Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi's November 19 veto of the law because he wanted 15 per cent of seats in parliament to be reserved for expatriate Iraqis and members of ethnic and religious minorities.
Most expatriate Iraqis are believed to be Sunni Muslims, like the vice president.
Lawmakers "approved the election law, without increasing the proportion of seats for Iraqi refugees abroad to 15 per cent, as requested by the vice president," member of parliament Bassem Sharif told the German Press Agency dpa.
Sunni lawmakers left the session ahead of the vote and told reporters they expected al-Hashemi to veto the new proposal, again throwing into doubt whether the elections will take place on time.
Lawmakers decided to use 2005 population figures from the Trade Ministry, but to augment them by 2.8 per cent per year to account for population growth, to determine how many deputies will serve in the new parliament.
The increase will be applied across the board, to every province. Expatriate and internally displaced Iraqis will vote for deputies in their home provinces as if they were at home, Iraqi lawmaker Amin Farhan told Baghdad's Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) had objected to the use of the Trade Ministry's statistics because they resulted in a net loss of seats representing the three provinces that together make up their semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq.
The KRG threatened to boycott the polls if the number of seats from the semi-autonomous Kurdish provinces was not increased.
The Iraqi constitution mandates that the parliament should include one deputy per 100,000 Iraqis. But without a census, which some fear could force a crisis over disputed territories around the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul by clarifying the ethnic makeup of those areas, parliament decided to use population data from a food-ration programme administered by the Trade Ministry.
Iraq had been scheduled to go to the polls on January 18, following a lengthy parliamentary tussle over setting the electoral law which will govern the ballot.
But Iraq's electoral commission said it was suspending preparations for the elections until the controversy over the veto was resolved.
Under the Iraqi constitution, the law must be passed 60 days before the elections take place, and elections must take place before the end of January.
Iraqi Shiite Muslims have requested that the voting take place before January 23, the beginning of the Shiite religious holiday of Arbaine.
