Oct. 25 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of the Central African Republic, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, has ended this Tuesday the mandate of Danielle Darlan as president of the Constitutional Court through a presidential decree for “permanent impediment”.
The decree, signed the day before by the Central African president, was read this Tuesday on public television, ending the process despite the fact that his mandate ends in March 2024. On October 21, the Constitutional Council itself recalled that its members “are irremovable for the duration of their mandate”.
“Neither you nor the Minister of Higher Education have the power to dismiss a constitutional judge from his functions or to shorten his mandate,” the president of the judicial body said earlier in a letter addressed to the head of the General Secretariat of the Government, Maxime Balalou, as reported by Radio France Internacionale.
The opposition party Kwa Na Kwa has criticized that this decision is a violation of the Constitution, while the African Party for Radical Transformation and Integration of States (Homeland) has stressed that it is only the jurisdiction of the judicial body “to formally restore the constitutional order”.
For more than a month, relations between the Executive and the Constitutional have deteriorated, especially after the judicial body rejected certain provisions of the Sango project, an initiative to adopt bitcoin as a digital currency in the country.
At the end of August, the head of state created by decree a commission in charge of drafting the new fundamental law that would allow him to run for a third term. However, following an opposition appeal, the Constitutional Court annulled these decrees.
The current Constitution prohibits the head of state from running for a third term. Touadéra was elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020, after controversial elections marked by the offensive of the rebels of the Coalition Patriots for Change (CPC) and the rejection of the results by the opposition.
The African country has been plunged into a serious crisis as a result of the elimination of the 2020 presidential candidacy of former President François Bozizé, who returned to the country at the end of 2019 to once again be a candidate for the Presidency, a position he abandoned in 2014 before the rise of the Séléka rebels, predominantly Muslims. Bozizé currently heads the CPC.
