Thursday, May 16, 2013
The stand off between Egypt’s President Mohammad Mursi and the country’s judiciary is deeply damaging. Mursi wants to force through a new law, which includes a controversial clause reducing the retirement age for judges to 60 years, down from the current 70 years. If this law is passed, almost a quarter of the country’s 13,000 judges and prosecution officials may have to retire.
The Supreme Judicial Council, Egypt’s top judicial body, decided on Wednesday to suspend its participation in a government-backed conference, which is supposed to act as a forum for the government and judiciary to find common ground. Many judges agree that reform is needed and that the same rules that worked under Hosni Mubarak’s regime should not apply today, but they are determined that neither the presidency or the parliament should implement any reforms to the judiciary, arguing that Mursi’s record of power-grabbing means that he will try to tweak any reform to favour his own Muslim Brotherhood party’s interests, while also seeking to curb the judges’ independence.
Mursi’s allies are convinced that the judiciary is filled with supporters of the former president, Mubarak, and that these judges are undermining the transition to democracy and seeking to stop the Islamists’ rise to power. However, as the judges and politicians argue, the country is facing economic collapse. The depth of the economic crisis is summed up by the disastrous Cairo stock market as daily volumes have plummeted to one quarter of what they were before the 2011 uprising. Two years of traumatic political instability has eroded all investor confidence and many industrialists are saying that the market has declined as far as it can go.
Mursi should let the judges come up with their reforms and acknowledge that an independent judiciary is a fundamental part of a constitution that requires the rule of law. The danger is that Mursi may not be comfortable submitting his government to the law, as a tough and independent judiciary will insist on — but that is part of what building a new Egypt should include.
by Gulf News
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