Haiti to Postpone October Local Elections

Port-Au-Prince - The first in a series of elections scheduled for this autumn will be postponed, said Haitian officials on Tuesday.

Interim chief of cabinet Michel Brunache said the electoral council decided to postpone the October 9 local elections until late December so that the nation could better prepare for November legislative and presidential elections.

Brunache said the presidential and legislative votes would move up from November 13 to November 6. A runoff presidential election was scheduled for December 11.

The head of the provisional electoral council, Max Mathurin, said the changes would not affect the interim government's goal of handing over power by February 7.

He said the decision also would not affect plans for the newly elected parliament to gather in early January.

Deadline for registration extended

Mathurin said: "This will not in any manner affect the key dates of our democracy."

The elections were the first since Haiti's first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted after a violent rebellion in February 2004.

The electoral council also extended the deadline for registering to vote to September 15.

United Nations envoy Juan Gabriel Valdes, speaking at the opening of a registration centre in the Bel-Air slum, said the extension would allow the country to reach the goal of registering at least 3.5 million voters.

Valdes said: "We must celebrate this decision."

Mathurin said so far, about 1.5 million people or a quarter of the electorate, had registered.

Observers had warned that Haitians could be too scared to vote amid political violence that had claimed hundreds of lives since the February 2004 revolt that toppled Aristide.

Killings of political opponents

Earlier on Tuesday, Valdes urged the interim government to free a former prime minister who had been jailed for more than a year without trial for allegedly orchestrating killings of political opponents.

Valdes said his office had sent Haiti's justice ministry a list that included former prime minister Yvon Neptune and others whom the peacekeeping mission believed were being held unjustly.

Valdes said: "For the sake of justice and of this country, it is unnecessary to keep a former prime minister in detention so long."

The UN envoy declined to say whether the list of prisoners also included Rev Gerard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest and prominent figure in Aristide's Lavalas family party who had been detained on suspicion of weapons charges and involvement in the slaying of a journalist.

The priest denied the charges and Amnesty International had called him a "prisoner of conscience".

Haitian officials didn't immediately comment on Tuesday on the call to release prisoners.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1751646,00.html