KUALA LUMPUR, March 23 — Preventing the public from knowing details of the Election Commission’s redelineation report is a betrayal of democracy and must be strongly condemned, Datuk Seri Azmin Ali said today.
The Selangor mentri besar, who is also Gombak MP, said there was no valid reason for Speaker Tan Sri Pandikar Amin Mulia to impose the embargo until next Wednesday.
“This will have an impact on the democratic rights of voters to choose their elected representative to Parliament.
“The action by the Speaker obviously shows that he had acted unfairly,” Azmin said in a statement.
Pandikar announced the embargo, until March 28, shortly after members of Parliament received a copy of the EC report yesterday.
The embargo means that parliamentarians are given around five days to study the content of the reports before the document is made public and possibly debated in Parliament.
Azmin said voters have the right to know if their voting constituencies had changed.
He explained that such a phenomenon can lead to a change in “identity and political direction”.
“Therefore, this matter (embargo of EC report) is in violation of their (voters’) rights that has been guaranteed by the Constitution,” he said.
The report contains three books detailing the redelineation process and EC’s recommendations, each being close to 500 pages long.
It also has a map for all the redrawn boundaries and a draft order to adopt the new boundaries in conducting elections.
The EC began working on the current redelineation proposal in 2016.
