EC registers AL, BNP, Jamaat, 11 other parties

Officials of the Election Commission on Sunday said they were still uncertain if the party registration process would be completed before the scrutiny of nomination papers scheduled for November 16 and 17.
They also feared that the commission might face trouble if any party went to court against the commission’s refusal of registration or holding back application.‘The parties, whose registration will be pending till the day before scrutiny of nomination papers, cannot contest the polls’, said NI Khan, chief of the commission’s technical evaluation committee formed to scrutinise applications and documents submitted by political parties for registration.

The commission till Sunday gave registration certificate to only one political party – Liberal Democratic Party – and com pleted the process for awarding certificates to 13 other political parties including Awami League, Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami. The commission will hear two factions of Khelafat Majlish and Jamiyat-e-Ulema Bangladesh tomorrow to settle their registration disputes.

‘We have finalised the process for giving registration certificates to 13 political parties, including AL, BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami. We will ask the parties by Monday to collect their registration certificates’, a member of the technical committee, Jesmin Tuli, said on Sunday evening. The expert committee has already examined all 107 applications and found only about 30 eligible for registration while the rest either existed only on papers or failed to fulfil the criteria for registration set by the amended Representation of the People Order.

The parties whose registration have been confirmed are – Awami League, Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, Jatiya Party (Ershad), Jatiya Party (Manju), Workers Party of Bangladesh, Samyabadi Dal, Krishak Sramik Janata League, Communist Party of Bangladesh, Bikalpadhara Bangladesh, National Awami Party (Muzaffar), Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (Inu) and Liberal Democratic Party. The original deadline set in the electoral roadmap for completing registration of political parties with the EC, was June 2008. Due to delay in completing reforms of the electoral law, the EC extended the time for the registration process and set October 30 as fresh deadline.

On the expiry of the revised deadline for registration the chief election commissioner, ATM Shamsul Huda, on October 30 said ‘There is no cut-off timeline for registration of political parties. Every task has a target date. October 30 was my target to complete party registration. Now it will continue.