Appeal to the President of the Sudan and the First Vice President

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Appeal to the President of the Sudan and the First Vice President

There are an estimated 8 million Sudanese dispersed around the four corners of the globe from Yellow Knife in the Canadian Eskimo to Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Rim and there between. Our remittances that are estimated to exceed hundreds of millions of dollars contribute to the Gross National Product and help keep alive millions of families back in the Sudan not to speak of our intellectual and other contributions.

Most of us, being some of the best educated and trained, have not chosen exile nor the Diaspora. Nevertheless, we do not enjoy the basic fundamental human right to elect our representatives in the houses of parliament. The only right the constitution leaves us with is the right to elect the president of the Republic the result of which is often a foregone conclusion as is the case in most Arab countries. The Sudanese Interim National Constitution and the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement state that the right to vote and \ or stand for election is conditional on being resident for 3 months prior to the date of the general elections in the constituency the citizen has been living in during the 2008-9 Fifth population consensus.

We the Sudanese in the Diaspora appeal to the Sudanese Government to reconsider the election law with a view to allowing us to participate in the forthcoming general elections in the geographic constituencies and not in the presidential elections alone.

That, and according to UN suggestion to both the consensus Council and its committees, the Sudan seem to have been designated a PRESIDENTIAL REPUBLIC. That in itself gives the president sweeping powers that renders the Sudanese political parties redundant, notwithstanding that the latter have hitherto been under various forms of censorship and\ or ban.
We the undersigned demand our right to vote in the geographic constituencies and \or similar constituencies to the historic Graduate Constituencies be created for those millions of Sudanese men and women.

The Interim National Constitution states that it is the duty of every Sudanese to participate in elections and referenda. It being a human right, we the undersigned pledge to seek to realise our enshrined in the constitution duty by all means open to us.

Arabic Forum