Iraqi Judicial Council President Calls for Constitutional Reform

Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council Chairman Faiq Zeidan expressed his solidarity with the demands of rewriting some articles of the constitution, which stand in the way of forming the disputed government.

In a lengthy article, Zeidan said, “The judge, like any citizen in society, diagnoses error or negativity as a social, political or economic phenomenon and suffers from its negative impact as a part of society. However, this suffering is more because he finds himself unable to exercise his role as a judge to address this mistake and hold the perpetrator accountable, as this is one of his duties as a judge”.

“The judge is bound by the constitutional rule stipulated in article 19, paragraph 2, of the Constitution of the Republic of Iraq of 2005”, which states that ‘no crime and no penalty shall be imposed except by a provision’.. The legal rule stipulated in article 1 of the Penal Code No. 111 of 1969, as amended, stipulates that ‘no punishment shall be imposed for an act or omission except on the basis of a law that criminalizes it at the time of its commission’ he added.

Therefore, constitutional violations or acts that are socially and morally unacceptable cannot be held accountable by the judge, whether institutions or individuals, unless there is an explicit text that is punishable according to the legal conditions regulated by the constitutional or legal text, Zeidan said.

For example, “the judiciary is fully aware of the negative effects of the constitutional violations that occurred after the legislative elections in October 2021, namely the failure to comply with the constitutional deadlines in forming the executive authority in the two parts of the President of the Republic and the Council of Ministers, as stipulated in article 66 of the Constitution. Despite the clarity of this constitutional breach, the judiciary was not able to address this breach or hold the perpetrators accountable because of the lack of a constitutional text authorizing it”.

“This and other circumstances require reconsidering the wording of the articles of the constitution, which obstruct the formation of constitutional authorities and have caused a state of political deadlock and the accompanying unfortunate events” he said. “The punishment for violating any constitutional text should be provided in the same text with clear wording that is not subject to ijtihad or interpretation”.

The head of the Sadrist movement, Muqtada Al-Sadr, had called for the dissolution of the parliament and entrusted the task to the judiciary before the latter responded to that invitation, based on the fact that it is not his constitutional duties and that the issue is related to the House of Representatives itself.

The political crisis in Iraq has been raging for months, and it has escalated in the face of the decision of the Federal Court to impose a two-thirds majority in the vote on the President of the Republic in the Parliament, which was later called the “suspended third”.