Women’s representation to be increased to 30% in May elections.

Below is an article published by the AFP:

The Kurdish regional parliament in north Iraq on Wednesday [11 February 2009] reserved 33 seats for women in the 111-member house under amendments to the election law ahead of polls due on May 19 [2009], its speaker said.

Adnan al-Mufti said the minimum age for candidates was lowered to 25, from 30, while women's representation was increased from 25 to 30 percent, the equivalent of five more seats.

The MPs have also set aside five seats for the Turkmen community and five for the Christian minorities, he told reporters after parliament met in the Kurdish capital of Arbil to endorse the amendments.

The name of the house was changed, from the National Council of Kurdistan of Iraq to the Parliament of Kurdistan of Iraq.

Mufti said last week that the legislative elections would be held, "in principle," on May 19 [2009], although no date has yet been set for provincial polling in the north.

Fourteen of Iraq's 18 provinces held elections on January 31 [2009] but those in the three autonomous Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah were put off to a date to be determined by the Kurdish parliament.

Elections in the disputed oil province of Kirkuk have been put off indefinitely.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party headed by regional president Massud Barzani are to field a joint list for the election, as they did four years ago.

In the current regional parliament, their joint list controls 76 seats. The Islamic Union of Kurdistan has nine seats and the Islamic Group of Kurdistan six.

Nine seats are held by the region's Christian and Turkmen minorities, leftist groups another five, and the other six are held by independents.

The autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq's three northern provinces was first set up in the early 1970s but it only really won genuine self-rule from the central government in Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait.

The regional government operates its own security force, the […] peshmerga.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in the US-led invasion of 2003, Kurdish leaders have campaigned vigorously for the incorporation of Kirkuk province and parts of Nineveh and Diyala in their autonomous region.