jamotto Posted October 13, 2005 Report Posted October 13, 2005 Link quote:BAGHDAD (AFP) - Around 18,000 detainees in US- and Iraqi-run jails began voting on the constitution, two days before the rest of Iraq votes on a charter that has sharply divided the country along ethnic lines. ADVERTISEMENT "The detainees have started to vote," said Abdel Hussein Hindawi, an official with the Independent Electoral Commission. Inmates were authorised to exercise their democratic right at 17 sites, including the notorious US-run Abu Ghraib prison that holds 4,600 Iraqis and Camp Bucca with a capacity of 6,500. "Several teams from the ministry of human rights have gone to the prisons under American and Iraqi control in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country," a ministry official said. "Deputy Prime Minister Abed Motlaq al-Juburi is at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq" to check on how the voting was going, he added. The country's most famous prisoner, Saddam Hussein, is believed held at a US jail near Baghdad Airport that was not one of the facilities identified by the top Iraqi election officer Adel al-Lami. The referendum is being held three years after Saddam -- who is awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity -- was re-elected for the last time in a poll that showed 100 percent of the vote in his favour. He and seven former henchmen are due to go on trial beginning October 19 over the 1982 murder of 143 people following an attempt on his life in a Shiite village. More than 15.5 million Iraqis are registered to vote on Saturday for a draft constitution that lays out the legal framework for a post-Saddam Iraq. Voting in prisons and hospitals was to continue for three days with detention centers in the northern Kurdish provinces of Sulaimaniyah and Arbil to start on Friday owing to logistical problems, electoral commission spokesman Farid Ayyar said. In a Baghdad hospital, doctors, nurses and security guards joined patients in early voting, electoral commission employee Yussef Ibrahim said. In all, about 1,000 people were expected to cast their ballots, in addition to at least 100 patients.
Darkling Posted October 14, 2005 Report Posted October 14, 2005 That's funny, in the US, Convicts aren't allowed to vote!?
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