A member of Libya’s High National Elections Commission (HNEC), Abdel-Hakim Al-Shaab held a meeting on Sunday, to discuss preparations for the planned elections.
The meeting was attended by the Director General of the Advanced International Company-agent of Voclcom, which provides call center services, a number of department directors, and the Head of HNEC’s Voter Registration Department in the commission.
The meeting discussed updating the call and assistance center system, and the available measures to be taken by the commission in order to improve the services of the call center.
They also reviewed a number of topics, including a plan to train the engineers supervising the Communications and Assistance Center. This is to ensure that HNEC’s work is performed according to the highest standards, as well as benefiting from experts working in the field of information and communication technology.
Notably, the UN Envoy to Libya, Abdoulaye Bathily indicated that “alternative plans may be considered if Libya’s legislative bodies fail to agree on electoral laws in a timely manner.” He indicated that he “would not accept moves to derail a march to elections.”
In an interview with Reuters on Friday, Bathily said that the legislative bodies “would be held accountable by the Libyan people, the international community, and regional leaders if they failed to do so.”
The UN diplomat refrained from detailing the alternatives, stating that they would be “discussed when necessary.”
Bathily is pushing for elections this year to replace the transitional political bodies that have outlived their mandates. He announced a new initiative last month to speed up the political process, prompting the two legislative bodies, the Libyan Parliament and the High Council of State (HCS), to set up a committee to review the electoral laws.
Bathily acknowledged that many Libyans “have shown their scepticism about the capacity or the goodwill of the Parliament and HCS to deliver on their mandate”, adding “this cannot be just another twist in the musical chairs”.
He pointed to the Parliament, which was elected in 2014 for an 18-month term, saying: “We cannot see an open-ended legitimacy. This does not exist anywhere in the world, where the Parliament is elected in an open-ended manner for an endless term.”
The HCS itself emerged from the members of an earlier transitional Parliament elected in 2012, and was created through a 2015 political agreement.
Bathily said the high-level steering panel he announced last month to enable elections would not function as “a physical kind of meeting where, all the stakeholders will come together”. Instead, it will involve him shuttling between different political, security, and civil society groups and representatives.
