Egypt court rules against panel composition
The 100-member body charged with drafting Egypt’s new constitution has been suspended by an Egyptian court. A Cairo court decided “to halt the parliament speaker’s decision to form the constituent assembly,” Judge Ali Fikri told Egyptian media. The court referred the case to a panel of judges to issue recommendations about panel’s fate.
Critics of the group say it is dominated by Islamists.
The decision calls into question the operation of the body, chosen by parliament to write the constitution after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year.
At least 20 per cent of the committee’s members have said they are withdrawing from it, with many saying it is dominated by Islamists, while secularists and others are under-represented.
An analyst said the ruling “will completely confuse matters.”
The group’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, controls nearly half of the seats in parliament’s lower house and is among those criticised for its strong presence on the panel.
The ruling concerning the constitutional panel appeared to address complaints about the decision to evenly split the committee
between lawmakers and non-lawmakers. Critics argued that with that division, the Freedom and Justice Party, the Salafi al-Nour Party and Islamist sympathisers held about 60 per cent of the seats.
What is needed now is for a national dialogue to end the deadlock surrounding the panel, el-Shater said in a statement posted on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website. Egypt “needs to write a constitution that will help establish a modern democracy and pave the way for the desired renaissance,” he said.
The ruling represents a win for “civic forces in the country,” said Hafez Abuseada, president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and one of those who filed a lawsuit against the constituent assembly.
The Islamists “must realise that the people revolted against the former ruling party because it monopolized power, and excluded the opposition,” he told the Bloomberg news agency.
