CAIRO, Egypt – When Iraq’s parliament convenes on Saturday to hear the prime minister’s choice for the top slots in the government, it will begin debate over a commission designed to keep senior officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime out of the government it replaced.

Deputies to the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, told the Associated Press yesterday that he will present the new government to the parliament, marking the end of nearly six months of negotiations over the government chosen in the December elections, which saw the trouncing of independent liberal parties in favor of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish voting blocs.

One of the major concessions in those negotiations, according to American and Iraqi officials, was a tacit understanding that the De-Baathification Commission created by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 will be allowed to expire or be scaled back significantly.

The commission, which was originally tasked with vetting appeals from senior Baathists who sought to join the Iraqi government, soon became engulfed in controversy. When Ayad Allawi was appointed in 2004 to lead Iraq’s interim government, he tried to dismantle the panel, which remains under the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi.

In an interview on the Arabic-language satellite TV channel Al-Arabiya on May 12, Mr. Chalabi said he would consider stepping down as chairman of the commission and that one of the first decisions the new parliament would have to make was to reconsider the three-year-old law that created it. “I tell you now that it is time for the law on this committee, which has continued for three years, to be reconsidered,” he said. “We have decided that this will be among the first tasks for the next House of Representatives. The constitution empowers the House of Representatives to tackle the committee and amend its law. We even said that it can be abolished by an absolute majority vote in the House of Representatives.”

In the same interview, however, Mr. Chalabi defended the commission’s work, which has come under attack from Sunni political leaders as well as their defenders in Washington. “With regard to de-Baathification, I believe that it was a civilized process, as it succeeded in preserving the lives of tens of thousands of Baathists in various parts of Iraq, because the Iraqi people, who hated the Baathist Party and considered it responsible, with Saddam, for the disasters that befell them, were ready for indiscriminate vengeance against Baathists. But, when they saw a government measure to tackle this issue, they refrained from violence and killing Baathists,” he said.

Critics accused the commission of being too political and said it was manipulated by Mr. Chalabi and his allies to target political enemies. The commission’s power, however, was also over estimated. Mr. Chalabi and his commission were unable to stop the Interior Ministry, under the Coalition Provisional Authority and subsequent Allawi regime, from rehiring many of the senior Baathist officials who were purged from the government for secretive intelligence and security posts. In some cases, those hires introduced traitors to the new Iraqi state into the security institutions designed to protect it.

Mr. Chalabi’s political future in Iraq is uncertain. When reached yesterday in Baghdad, he declined to be interviewed. He has, however, been spoken of as a possible candidate for the Interior Ministry, or he may retain his position as one of the country’s three deputy prime ministers.