BEIRUT: A group of 10 council members tasked with looking into legal challenges to the extension of Parliament’s term failed to meet for the third time Tuesday, all but guaranteeing that the planned extension would go ahead this week.

 

The Constitutional Council, a body split evenly between Christians and Muslims and tasked with ruling on the constitutionality of laws, postponed its meeting until Friday, a day after Parliament’s term expires and the extension goes into effect.

 

Council member Judge Antoine Kheir announced the delay at the body’s headquarters in Hadath, east Beirut.

 

“I’m a judge, not a politician,” he said, according to the state-run National News Agency. “There will be a council session Friday, June 21.” But he would not elaborate on why the council would hold a meeting a day after Parliament’s mandate expired.

 

The council cannot be convened unless at least eight of its members are present. Only seven judges attended the Tuesday meeting.

 

Lebanese political leaders failed to reach an accord on a new vote law last month, prompting Parliament to vote on a 17-month extension of its mandate.

 

Parliamentarians voted overwhelmingly in favor of the measure. The extension was challenged by President Michel Sleiman and MP Michel Aoun, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, before the council.

 

The council was to discuss a report by its president on the challenges.

 

“Everyone stabbed us on the issue of Parliament’s extension,” Aoun said after his bloc’s weekly meeting.

 

Aoun’s allies in the March 8 bloc, including the Shiite Amal and Hezbollah movements, as well as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, supported the extension against Aoun’s objections. Aoun refused to single out Hezbollah for blame, saying that “even if we erase Hezbollah’s votes the extension would not have failed.”

 

The delay in meeting ensures a de facto extension of the Parliament’s mandate, which ends on June 20.

 

Several activists protested outside the council’s headquarters over its failure to convene and against the mandate extension, accusing the judiciary of bowing to political pressure, and lobbed tomatoes at posters depicting Lebanon’s MPs.

 

The council had originally planned to meet Tuesday and Thursday in a last-ditch attempt to decide on the challenges to the mandate extension.