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By Libya Herald reporter.
Tunis, 8 March 2017:
House of Representatives (HoR) President Ageela Saleh has called for a fresh parliamentary elections to be held by February 2018 according to his spokesman Fathi Al-Maryami. Saleh also wants Presidential elections to take place at the same time.
Maryami was quoted by the Beida-based office of the Libyan news agency LANA, saying that Saleh had informed the High National Electoral Commission of his decision.
The news comes a day after the HoR voted to suspend its involvement in the Libya Dialogue process because of fighting in the central oil crescent region, and is seen as a response to this. Ageela Saleh is said to have wanted progress on the dialogue team.
His decision to call for direct presidential elections (and possibly even those for the HoR) is likely to be contested, as it is not his to make and had already the subject of legal action.
Back in 2014, the then General National Congress decided that the future HoR would choose whether a president should be directly elected or appointed by the HoR itself. This never happened.
Moreover, the issue is further complicated by the notorious Supreme Court ruling in November 2014 which opponents of the HoR took to mean that the elections for it had been nullified and that therefore it did not exist.
In fact the Supreme Court annulled Paragraph 11 of the Seventh Amendment to the Libyan Constitutional Declaration, passed by Congress on 11 March, 2014, which concerned itself with the HoR’s requirement to decide within 45 days from its first meeting “to settle the question of whether the temporary president is to be elected directly or indirectly.” It also annulled all subsequent effects of Paragraph 11 being removed.
