Justice Minister Samir Jisr has shown the right instincts by reacting to the Metn by-election crisis by creating a new committee charged with the drafting of a new Election Law. The panel has been asked to close loopholes in the existing legislation and to make the work of official tabulators more efficient and reliable by clearly defining their tasks and responsibilities.

These are intelligent goals, and noble ones, too, but they will go the way of similarly good ideas that have come and gone over the years unless the committee is allowed to do its work objectively and until a truly independent judiciary is in place that can be trusted to enforce the law.

The Metn fiasco stemmed not just from vagueness over the requirement that ballots be prepared privately but also from a long list of questions that were either left unanswered by the law or shielded against the rightful jurisdiction of the courts. In this manner what amounted to a family feud over a single parliamentary seat evolved into a full-fledged national crisis that threatened to bring down the Cabinet, undermined both foreign and domestic confidence in the country’s stability, and further eroded claims that Lebanon is a genuine democracy.

The general elections in 2005 will see some 128 legislators chosen, and if even a 10th of those races degenerate into the kind of debacle witnessed in Metn, the entire existing order could collapse with a resounding crash.

The nation has three years to prepare for that acid test, plenty of time to avoid a repeat of the appalling spectacle of last-minute gerrymandering that marred the 2000 round. Jisr has gotten the work off to an appropriately early start, but that in itself is no guarantee of success.

A few strict principles will have to guide the process to make it worth the effort, among them a commitment to fairness over expediency, a ruling out of districts being drawn so as to favor one camp’s chances over those of others, and the promulgation of rules and regulations that act as effective prophylactics against illegitimate campaign tactics, efforts to tamper with the voting process, and the exertion of undue pressure on particularly vulnerable sectors of the electorate such as the poor, the illiterate, and the newly naturalized.

But even a perfectly crafted law will count for naught unless all the parties concerned know that its articles can and will be consistently enforced by an unbiased judiciary whose members do not have to fear for their jobs ­ or their lives ­ in the event that they rule against this or that “connected” group or individual. Laws are worth less than the paper on which they are printed unless qualified jurists have full power and authority to adjudicate disputes on the basis of the facts at hand and the legislation at issue.

This is not a mundane debate relating solely to obscure legal principles and minor electoral structures. It is a trial of Lebanon’s viability as a nation. Where laws have no validity or force, the will of the people has little chance of being articulated and even less of being obeyed. And in the absence of a government that rules by the manifest consent of its citizenry, no regime can claim the popular support required to render difficult decisions or even the moral legitimacy to consider them.

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