Constitutional Council: Exhaustive Hearing Given To Petitions

By 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, October 18, 2018, the Constitutional Council rejected 17 of the 18 post-electoral petitions filed at the Council calling for either the total or partial cancellation of the October 7, 2018 presidential election. This was when the President of the Constitutional Council, Clément Atangana passed the highly awaited ruling rejecting the petition filed by Maurice Kamto, candidate of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) in the presidential election calling for the cancellation of the election in seven regions.

The President of the Council stated that the petition was unjustified after reading out the various counts of irregularities contained in the petition, most of which he said were unfounded, inadmissible and had no proofs. The ruling was one of the high moments of the audience considering that the Council took two days to hear submissions from the different parties concerning the petition.

The ruling was announced on the hearing of Wednesday, October 17 slated for 6:00 p.m. yesterday. When the President of the Council suspended hearings at 5:00 p.m. and said resumption was at 6:00 p.m. everyone’s attention was focused on the stated time but the recess lasted up to 7:08 p.m. By the time of going to press, the Constitutional Council was hearing submissions on the last petition being the 18th filed by the candidate of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), Joshua Nambangi Osih, calling for the cancellation of the election with the main arguments that elections did not actually take place in the North West and South West Regions due to the ongoing insecurity situation in the two regions.

They raised other cases of election irregularities in the two regions and by extension to the other regions of the...