ADDIS ABABA: Djibouti’s parliament removed the age limit for presidents with a unanimous vote on Sunday, its speaker said, opening the way for leader Ismail Omar Guelleh to run for a sixth term.
Guelleh, 77, has held power since 1999 in the tiny Horn of Africa nation, a major port that hosts military bases for the United States, France, China, Japan and Italy.
Djibouti’s lawmakers unanimously approved the change to the constitution to remove a bar on running for president past the age of 75.
The move allows Guelleh to run in the next election in April 2026, likely facing minimal opposition in a country with limited freedom of expression and press.
“The National Assembly ratified the removal of the age limit today, so it is official,” said parliament speaker Dileita Mohamed Dileita.
Parliament had already passed the motion a week earlier in an initial vote that was then approved by Guelleh and sent back to lawmakers for the final vote.
Dileita earlier said the constitutional change was necessary to ensure “the stability of the small country, in a troubled region, the Horn of Africa, with Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.”
Guelleh won the last election in 2021 with 97 percent of the vote while his party, the Union for the Presidential Majority, holds the majority of parliamentary seats.
He succeeded Hassan Gouled Aptidon, the father of Djibouti’s independence, in 1999 after serving as his chief of staff for 22 years.
Djibouti has only around one million inhabitants but lies on the strategic trade route of the Bab El-Mandeb Strait on the Red Sea.
Djibouti parliament removes presidential age limit: speaker
https://arab.news/b3hm9
Djibouti parliament removes presidential age limit: speaker
- Vote opens the way for leader Ismail Omar Guelleh to run for a sixth term
- Guelleh, 77, has held power since 1999 in the tiny Horn of Africa nation
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
