BAGHDAD — Iraq’s highest court Sunday ordered parliament to resume its sessions, after the congress, elected in March, convened only once in June for 18 minutes.
The Federal Supreme Court called the delay unconstitutional, and the acting speaker promised to convene parliament again within days.
Parliament has gone unattended as Iraq’s most powerful blocs have tried for seven months to negotiate an agreement on the government’s top posts.
“Holding the session at this time will be the beginning of another problem,”warned Izz al-Din al-Dawla, a member of Iraqiya, one of the top vote-getters in the March 7 election.
Sunday’s ruling came in response to a case filed by a civil-society group, backed by the venerable but small Communist Party, against the acting parliament speaker, Fouad Massoum. With the backing of most factions, Massoum convened the 325-member Council of Representatives in June, then left it open indefinitely, but unattended, to give politicians time to negotiate the makeup of a government that will preside over the American withdrawal of 50,000 troops by 2012.
The court agreed with thecivil-society group’s contention that Massoum’s procedural move was unconstitutional and ordered lawmakers to resume work.
Massoum said he would abide by the ruling and schedule a meeting soon.
“I’m not going to disobey this decision,” Massoum, a Kurd, said in a telephone interview. “I will call for a session. But if the majority of parliament doesn’t show up, I won’t be in charge.”
Iraqi activists celebrated the decision as a step toward strengthening political life and addressing deepening popular anger with the country’s political class - not least with the newly elected lawmakers, who have not met in more than four months but continue to receive their salaries of about $11,000 a month.
“This is a historic moment for us, the civil-society organizations,” a leading activist, Hanaa Edwar, said. If the lawmakers do not convene the session again soon, she said, “we will go to the court and ask them to dissolve parliament.”
Politicians interpreted the ruling as giving parliament two weeks to reconvene. Once parliament convenes, the constitution outlines a very specific timetable: Members pick a speaker and two deputies, and then, within 30 days and by a two-thirds majority, a president. The president has 15 days to name the head of the largest parliamentary bloc to form a government, a task to be completed in 30 days.
But time and again, politicians in Iraq have found ways to flout an admittedly pliable constitution. Failure to achieve a quorum would be one way to prevent parliament from acting.
Politicians from across the spectrum hailed the court’s decision publicly Sunday, even if they acknowledged that negotiations might still have a way to go.
“The court had to give this decision,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a lawmaker with a faction loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric whose alliance with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has buoyed the prime minister’s chances of returning to power. “The timing was good. It would have been better if it was even earlier, because this situation has so badly affected Iraqis.”
Nevertheless, no leading political bloc seemed eager to have parliament meet again, at least not until the framework for an agreement was reached.
The broadest fault line in those negotiations remains a contest between al-Maliki and an alliance led by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former interim prime minister, whose group won two more seats than Maliki’s. Both coalitions are soliciting the support of the Kurds, deemed essential for gathering a majority in parliament.
The Kurds have pushed for an inclusive government with Allawi’s participation, a compromise that would almost certainly require curbing the prime minister’s powers.
Some analysts hailed Sunday’s decision, at minimum, as a step toward transparency in the negotiations.
“At the very least,” said William Warda, a political analyst, “it will create dialogue inside parliament, where debates will be open, and not in closed rooms or outside Iraq, where you don’t know what’s going on.”
Khalid al-Asadi, a lawmaker in al-Maliki’s coalition, said he thought lawmakers were close to striking a deal in which President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and al-Maliki would remain in their posts. Allawi’s slate, he said, needs to select someone to be parliament speaker.
“We might choose a temporary one until Iraqiya makes up its mind and names one,” he said.
Iraqiya spokesman Maysoon Damluji said the bloc’s 91 lawmakers would not adhere to the court’s ruling.
“We will not attend a meeting of parliament unless a deal has been made,” she said in a telephone interview.
Iraqiya contends that it is entitled to form the incoming government and has accused al-Maliki in the past of using the courts for political gain.
Meanwhile, Iraq formed a committee to investigate the classified U.S. military documents published on the WikiLeaks website that contained allegations about abuse in the country, the Iraqiya television said.
The committee, headed by the minister of justice, will be in charge of “following up and monitoring the documents published by WikiLeaks,” the broadcaster said, citing government spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh.
The nearly 400,000 classified papers released by WikiLeaks.org detail abuse and murder of civilians and prisoners by the Iraqi forces and said U.S. troops turned a blind eye to such state-sponsored abuse.
The documents also described Iranian aid to Iraqi militias bent on destabilizing the government and showed 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths.
Although the documents appear to be authentic, their origin could not be independently confirmed. The Pentagon has condemned the leak, as has Britain’s Ministry of Defense, which said it could put soldiers’ lives at risk.
The allegations are extremely serious and must be investigated, a top British official said Sunday.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg told BBC television that the accounts of violence in Iraq “are distressing to read about and they are very serious.”
Clegg said it was not for Britain to tell the U.S. how to respond, but that any allegations of abuse by British troops “are extremely serious and need to be looked at.” Information for this article was contributed by Anthony Shadid, Omar al-Jawoshy, Yasser Ghazi and Duraid Adnan of The New York Times; by Ernesto Londono of The Washington Post; by Lara Jakes of The Associated Press; and by Nayla Razzouk of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/25/2010