Saturday, Dec 01, 2012
(From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
By Sam Dagher
CAIRO -- Critics of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi slammed the country's draft constitution after it emerged from a hasty all-night session, with opponents charging the document was a jumbled attempt to impose Islamic law produced by what they called an unrepresentative body dominated by Islamists.
The draft charter, which the president has vowed to put to a national vote soon, emerged a week after Mr. Morsi issued a decree broadly expanding his powers, spurring violent rallies against the president in the worst crisis of his five-month term. The battle is expected to play out in coming days both in Egypt's courts, where judges will hear challenges to Mr. Morsi's decree, and in the streets, where supporters and opponents have been laying plans for big rallies.
The draft constitution was finished early Friday by Egypt's 100-member Constituent Assembly, a body that had been conceived as representing Egyptians broadly but was dominated by Islamist politicians after it was boycotted by Christian and secular members who made up more than one-quarter of the body. The assembly sprinted to complete the draft ahead of a scheduled hearing Sunday in the country's top court, where the body itself faces a challenge as unrepresentative and unconstitutional.
Hossam El Gheriany, the chairman of the panel that drafted the constitution, said early Friday that he and 85 members of the assembly would hand-deliver the document on Saturday to President Morsi, who would then announce the date for a national referendum. Several government officials and members of the panel said the vote would be held by mid-December.
"Completing this historic step represents important progress for Egypt and its people," said the Muslim Brotherhood, the main party in Mr. Morsi's Islamist coalition.
The question for Mr. Morsi and his allies is whether they can overcome a barrage of opposition that has grown in the past week and now includes representatives of the judiciary, youth and liberal and secular forces, and also many Christians, moderate Islamists and a large cross-section of the population that considers itself independent.
"We are watching, we are sitting in and we are rejecting a shameful constitution," read a large banner in Cairo's central Tahrir Square, where tens of thousands of people flocked Friday to demand annulment of the constitution, the panel that drafted it and the extraordinary powers Mr. Morsi gave himself.
"We consider the current project for a constitution illegitimate from the standpoint of form and content," the National Salvation Front of opposition political parties, which was formed to confront Mr. Morsi's decree, said in a statement read Friday on Tahrir Square by politician Mohammed ElBaradei. The square has been filled, for eight days, by thousands of Mr. Morsi's opponents.
The president's Islamist supporters, who had largely stayed off the streets in the past week, came out in processions around the country Friday. They are planning a massive gathering Saturday outside the main campus of Cairo University to rally around "Shariah [Islamic law] and legitimacy," as described by parties in the governing Islamist coalition.
Many legal experts said they saw major ambiguities and contradictions in several articles dealing with the role of Shariah, or Islamic law; the powers of the president and the legislature; the nature of the judicial and electoral systems; and the establishment of regulatory and oversight bodies and agencies.
"There are catastrophic elements in this constitution," said Diaa Rashwan, a senior analyst with the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, who is also affiliated to the political forces opposed to Mr. Morsi. He also saw a mark of defiance in the process of approving the draft, which began shortly after midday on Thursday and ended Friday morning, and was televised. "What we are seeing is more akin to preparations for war, not passage of a constitution," he said.
The Supreme Constitutional Court is expected to convene Sunday to take up a case asking to disband the Constituent Assembly, which was formed by the Islamist-dominated lower chamber of Parliament. It was later dissolved by the same court when Egypt was ruled by the interim military that preceded Mr. Morsi's rule.
Many Egyptian legal experts now expect the constitutional court to postpone its case on the body itself, while the administrative branch of the judiciary hears more than a dozen separate lawsuits filed against the decree Mr. Morsi issued last week shielding his own decisions and those of the Constituent Assembly from the judiciary.
On Friday, a group of judges with the State Council, the body overseeing the administrative judiciary, issued a statement lambasting Mr. Morsi's decree as "worthless" and "null and void."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
01-12-12 0712GMT
