Zimbabwe’s main opposition party has
launched legal action against President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF
party’s landslide victory in last week’s vote.
Lawyers for outgoing Prime Minister
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the defeated Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC-T), filed an appeal with the Constitutional Court on Friday over
the parliamentary and presidential election results.
The lawyers said they discovered that 870,000 names were duplicated on the voters’ lists.
Douglas Mwonzora, an MDC-T spokesman,
said that they would submit good evidence of vote-buying, rigging and
other irregularities.
Outside the court, Lawyer Chris Mhike
said that Tsvangirai wanted the elections declared null and void and for
fresh elections to be held in 60 days.
The court’s judges are considered loyalists of Mugabe, who has been in power since the country gained independence 33 years ago.
Voters ‘turned away’
“We need to put the Zimbabwean courts before a trial,” Mwonzora said just before the papers were filed.
“These are the same courts that ordered
the elections to be held without reforms and we are bringing this to
them, the consequences of their decision.”
Electoral fraud allegations have mounted in the wake of the July 31 polls.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said
on Thursday that more than 750,000 urban voters were missing from the
electoral list, in what they described as “a systematic effort to
disenfranchise an estimated million voters”.
“A total of 99.97 percent of rural
voters were registered while only 67.94 percent of urban voters were
registered,” said Solomon Zwana, the network’s chairman.
Zimbabwe’s state election commission has
acknowledged some mistakes in last week’s disputed elections, but said
that they were not enough to sway the win for Mugabe.
President Jacob Zuma of South Africa , the chief mediator on Zimbabwe , congratulated Mugabe.
‘Widespread manipulation’
Britain, the United States and other Western countries have criticised the vote.
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