filing of 3 petitions in High Court
–in Barbados
THREE ELECTION petitions are scheduled to be filed in Dominica’s High Court today in relation to controversies surrounding the conduct of last December 18 general elections in that member state of the Caribbean Community.

The incumbent Dominca Labour Party (DLP) of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit secured a landslide 18-3 majority for the 21-member parliament.

But the three court petitions, for which the service of the Trinidad and Tobago Senior Counsel, Douglas Mendez, has been retained by the main opposition United Workers Party (UWP), includes one against the 37-year-old Prime Minister.

This petition questions the legality of Skerrit’s eligibility for nomination as a candidate over disputed circumstances of his acquisition of French citizenship and the holder of a passport issued by France.

The two other petitions have to do with claimed denials of the UWP’s access to state media throughout the election campaign; and, thirdly, the validity of the declared results for the constituency of La Plaine, where the incumbent Ron Green, leader of the UWP, was defeated by two votes.

At the 2005 general election, Green had won the constituency by a plurality of 126 votes. For last month’s election, he was first declared victor with a slim two-vote majority only to learn that in a recount, he had lost his seat by two valid ballots. He lost little time in declaring,”let the court decide who won…”

A well known senior counsel in Dominica, expected to be involved in the coming post-election court battles for the government, was confident in his comments to me about a positive outcome in relation to Prime Minister Skerrit”s “citizenship” controversy, as well as the vote-counting in Ron Green’s constituency and the matter of opposition access to state-owned media.

Hot political issues during the election campaign had included foreign-funding sources for the governing DLP’s proposed US$8.03 million to cover expenses such as facilitating free return airfares to overseas-based Dominicans to vote in targeted constituencies, among them that of UWP leader Green.

The claims were stoutly rejected by the DLP as coming from “frustrated” opponents of the UWP as well as the Dominica Freedom Party who were engaged in perceived “poor” campaign strategies.

In contrast to the DLP’s well-funded campaign, the UWP’s was not only poorly funded, but, according to one economist well known in regional circles but prefers anonymity, the opposition parties had “failed” to energise voters by their lack of alternative fiscal and economic policies to those of the governing DLP.

For him, there was a yawning credibility to the opposition’s claim of electoral malpractices in the face of the declared results of a 61 percent endorsement for the victorious DLP to the UWP’s 34 percent.

Now, as Prime Minister Skerritt prepares to host CARICOM’s first Inter-Sessional Meeting for 2010, attention will be focused on the coming post-election court battles in Roseau.