628 A Permanent Emergency
When the People’s Assembly resumes sessions on Sunday it will discuss not only new legislations dealing with traffic, economic courts and the rights of children but could well be asked to further extend the emergency laws which expire on 31 May, or else approve new anti-terror legislation.
On 30 April, 2006, the People’s Assembly approved the extension of the emergency law for two more years by an overwhelming majority. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif vowed at the time that the extension would be the last and that during the 2008 parliamentary session the emergency law would finally be abrogated in favour of new anti-terror legislation. Nazif recalled that in his 2005 presidential election manifesto President Hosni Mubarak had promised a Western-style anti-terror law. “The government is keen that President Mubarak’s promise be fulfilled in 2008,” Nazif told MPs.
In the summer of 2006 Nazif formed a committee to draft the anti-terror law headed by Moufid Shehab, minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs.
“This government will not present the People’s Assembly with a law that contains surprises,” Shehab said. “Copies of the final draft law will be available to all political forces at least one month ahead of its discussion in the People’s Assembly.”
Two years later, and a month before the end of the current 2007/2008 parliamentary session, and no copies are available. Nor are officials particularly keen to talk about what was once a flagship piece of legislation. Full article…
Will the government again fail to deliver on President Mubarak’s 2005 promise to replace the Emergency Law with a counterterrorism law? Or will it ram the law through Parliament in short order, with the amended text of article 179 providing a thin veneer of constitutionality?
The average Egyptian is 24 years old. The Emergency Law, first passed in 1958, has been in place almost continuously since 1967 (it was briefly allowed to lapse in 1980, then reinstated after Sadat’s assassination 18 months later). So the average Egyptian has lived his entire life under the provisions of the Emergency Law. Unless the draft counterterrorism law leaked to the press in February looks very different when it’s submitted to Parliament for a rubber stamp, generations more risk living under those same provisions.
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