Comoros court refuses to guarantee diaspora voting rights

The Comoros’ supreme court on Saturday refused to guarantee voting rights for the diaspora.

The court rejected an appeal calling for diaspora voters to be allowed to participate in next year’s presidential polls.

“The application is declared inadmissible”, ruled the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation.

Although the electoral code provides for Comorians living abroad to vote, in practice this right is not applied as the mechanism for them to vote are not in place.

One in three Comorians are part of the diaspora.

The highest court in the Indian Ocean archipelago, the decision of which cannot be challenged, ruled that the Franco-Comorian lawyer who filed the petition, Maliza Said Soilihi, was not eligible to do so.

“The electoral code promulgated in 2023 specifies how this fundamental right is to be applied”, she told the court.

Denouncing a “violation of fundamental rights”, she demanded “the necessary measures to guarantee the registration of Comorian citizens living abroad on the electoral roll” for the next presidential election.

The country is due to hold presidential and regional elections in February at the latest.

President Azali Assoumani, who is currently at the G20 summit in India, is standing for re-election.

The controversial head of state, who came to power in 1999 in a coup, has had many opponents arrested. Many others have gone into exile, notably to France.

Soilihi, 39, a former local councillor in Marseille, a French city often described as an extension of the Comoros because of the large Comorian community there, had filed her application “as a citizen” in August.

The lawyer said on Saturday that she planned to take the case to “supra-national bodies”.

The Comorian community in France is estimated to number 300,000, more than half of whom live in the city of Marseille. The three islands of the Comoros have a population of around 870,000, according to an official statistics.