The Supreme Court Ruling

For those who have been following the scene in Egypt will know that after the revolution the Egyptians for the first time elected their own parliament.  There have been two cases in front of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, the first case was the isolation law which intended to isolate the old regime and preventing them from participating in the political life in Egypt, the other one was the unconstitutionality of one third of the parliament.

Three days ago, the court ruled against the isolation law, which means that the ex- prime minister of Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Shafek will be able to continue in the presidential run and the second case, which was very shocking, the court ruled that 1/3 of the parliament is unconstitutional which means that 1/3 of the parliament has to be dissolved. Resulting from this, due to an item in the Constitution, the whole elected parliament of Egypt has been dissolved and the legislative powers have been transferred back to the SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces).

The reason behind this is that the election of the parliament has two systems in Egypt, List and individual. 1/3 of the parliament is individuals and 2/3s are lists. Meaning, when I went to vote, I received two papers, one that has the names of all the candidates who are individuals, and the other paper contained lists. I should choose 2 individuals and 1 list. Each list represents a political party, which means that candidates who don’t belong to a political party can’t run in the 2/3 of the parliament that is elected by lists. On the other hand, the individual system, people from political parties and people who aren’t in political parties can compete in the individual system. The court saw that being unconstitutional because the members of political parties have an advantage over the people who aren’t. To sum it up, people who are in political parties have the choice to compete in the 2/3 of lists or 1/3 individuals, on the other hand, people who don’t belong to political parties can only compete on 1/3 of the chairs.

One of the direct results of such ruling that the legislative powers have once again put in the hands of the SCAF, which means that the SCAF is going to be responsible of writing the new constitution and selecting the group of legislatives who are going to write it. The other result that Ahmed Shafeq is still in the presidential race and that he will not be isolated.

Things are not as clear as they seem, this is why my upcoming blog will discuss my opinion in all what happened and the reasons behind such ruling and how I feel about the dissolving of the parliament.

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