Legal scholar Achilleas Emilianides has intervened in the public debate over the allocation of parliamentary seats, arguing that there is a genuine problem in the way the third distribution is applied.
Emilianides, Associate Professor of Law and Head of the Department of Law at the University of Nicosia, said in a social media post that the issue was not created by recent commentary, but stems from Supreme Court decisions which he described as mistaken.
He explained that, after the first allocation of seats, each party’s unused vote remainders are used for the second allocation. This is carried out in electoral districts where parties have the highest unused remainders, provided that a seat remains available in the district concerned.
If seats are still unallocated after the second distribution, the third distribution follows. According to Emilianides, logic would suggest that votes already used in the second distribution should then be deducted, with only the remaining unused vote balances taken into account.
However, he said that after the 1981 parliamentary elections, the Supreme Court ruled in the Zachariades case that, for the purposes of the third distribution, the vote remainders left after the first distribution are used again.
Emilianides said this interpretation does not affect the total number of seats won by each party, but it does create a distortion in terms of the districts in which each party receives a seat during the third allocation.
He added that an attempt was made to overturn this interpretation after the 2006 parliamentary elections, but without success, as the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed its earlier position.
“Forty-five years have passed since Zachariades, but Parliament has not amended the relevant provision in order to remedy the distortion,” Emilianides said.
