Cabinet approves appointments to Constitutional Council
Cabinet approved on Tuesday the appointment of the remaining five members of the Constitutional Council but postponed discussion over the 2009 state budget.
"The ratification of the state budget was left pending and the next Cabinet to be formed following the June 7 polls will be tasked to deal with this issue," a well-informed ministerial source told The Daily Star.
The Cabinet session, headed by President Michel Sleiman, was held at Baabda Palace.
The new members of the Constitutional Council appointed by the ministers include Maronite Issam Sleiman, Orthodox Salah Mukheiber, Shiite Asaad Diab, Sunni Toufik Subra and Druze Suheil Abdel-Samad.
Sleiman is the personal adviser of President Michel Sleiman during the current dialogue sessions, while Diab was a former minister of social affairs and a former president of the Lebanese University. Diab is also known to be close to Speaker Nabih Berri. The biographies of Mukhaiber, Subra, and Abdel-Samad were yet to be distributed as The Daily Star went to press.
The Constitutional Council is the only governmental body with the authority to arbitrate post-election challenges, and though five of its seats were filled in December, political jockeying held up the remaining appointments until Tuesday”s Cabinet session.
Parliament elected five jurists to the Constitutional Council last December – Antoine Kheir, Antoine Msarra, Zaghloul Atiyeh, Tarek Ziadeh and Ahmad Taqieddine.
During previous Cabinet sessions, the opposition was insisting on resolving the pending constitutional and administrative appointments within a single package that would also include the controversial issues of the 2009 national budget. But the opposition later agreed on postponing discussions over the state budget.
Opposition ministers had held a meeting before the Cabinet session kicked off on Tuesday at the office of deputy Prime Minister Issam Abu Jamra.