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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Supplement Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters NGO bill 'satisfies' MPs
By Gamal Essam El-Din
A long-awaited draft law that will regulate the activities of some 14,000 registered NGOs was approved on Monday by the People's Assembly's Religious and Social Affairs Committee. Committee members agreed that the bill is generally acceptable and good, compared to the law currently in force, which dates back to 1964 and gives the Ministry of Social Affairs huge control over NGO activities and fund-raising.
Mervat Tellawi
The new 75-article bill, MPs argued, provides NGOs with legal and judicial protection against dissolution and simplifies, to a large extent, their registration process. To the dislike of many NGO activists, MPs praised the bill for banning the formation of what they described as secret organisations which largely depend on foreign funding and exercise activities that go against the nation's interests. Under the new bill, NGOs will no longer need to seek permission from the Ministry of Social Affairs to set up. They merely have to give the ministry notice. If it is rejected, the issue will be considered by courts of law. The same applies to NGOs wishing to become members of international organisations.
Addressing the committee, Minister of Social Affairs Mervat Tellawi said that the bill is the fruit of a series of meetings and conferences with NGO representatives over a period of a year-and-a-half. "During this time, the bill was drafted and re-drafted many times and came under attack. At last, we have reached a balanced form that secures an equation between freedom and responsibility. We aim to eliminate the administrative authority's control over NGOs and put an end to the appointment of ministry officials on their boards. This was a highly crucial issue to many. There are people, however, who want to have absolute freedom and independence. This is impossible because freedom has to be balanced by responsibility," Tellawi said.
In constitutional terms, Justice Minister Farouk Seif El-Nasr said citizens have the right to establish civil organisations, but he argued that this is a restricted right. "According to Article 95 of the constitution, organisations which act against society's interest should be banned. In general, however, the bill is a democratic gain, because it gives NGOs judicial protection against dissolution. This will be the responsibility of a judicial committee headed by a counsellor on the Court of Appeals. NGOs even have the right to contest the decisions of this committee before a Court of First Instance," said Seif El-Nasr.
Fathi Naguib, first under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice, pointed out that Egypt has a "glorious" record of voluntary activities and civil organisations. "We should not forget that Cairo University, and even education as a whole, was the fruit of voluntary and civil efforts. We formulated this bill to address three types of NGO activity. It aims to give greater flexibility to NGOs which are heavily involved in development projects. It also gives NGOs suffering from technical and financial problems an opportunity to help themselves. Last, it bans entities which perform the activities of NGOs, but do not have the legal form to be so," said Naguib.
Although MPs agreed that the bill makes several concessions to NGOs, they also echoed the objections of some organisations to the draft. Ahmed Abu-Heggi, an MP for Sohag Governorate, voiced the concerns of some organisations claiming that the bill is aimed at settling accounts with those who oppose the government, especially human rights organisations. "We do not want a law that is mainly designed to deal with certain people with whom the government seeks to settle accounts," Abu-Heggi said.
Responding to Abu-Heggi, Tellawi affirmed that the bill came in response to wide-scale demand, and was by no means an attempt to settle accounts with certain groups. "I would like to say that laws are not passed to settle accounts. You all know that everything is changing in Egypt. We are undertaking the process of revamping old legislation to cope with these changes. We discussed this law with NGO representatives for a year-and-a-half. At the end, some approved this version and others objected to it," Tellawi told the committee.
Some MPs were keen, however, to criticise human rights organisations. One of them is Taha Ghalwash, a National Democratic Party (NDP) deputy for Kafr Al-Sheikh Governorate. "We hope this bill will protect us from the false propagators of democracy. These people, as a matter of fact, propagate sectarian strife, intellectual terrorism and religious extremism. They have to come under some sort of discipline if they really want to have organisations of their own," said Ghalwash.
He indicated that he had submitted several requests to People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour, asking that a number of hearing sessions be held to discuss the activities of human rights groups. "It was our duty to invite members of these organisations to the assembly to prove that much of their talk [about human rights conditions in Egypt] is entirely unfounded," Ghalwash said.
Joining forces with Ghalwash, Edward Ghali El-Dahabi, an appointed deputy, said the law currently in force gave some organisations the opportunity to register themselves with the public notary as an NGO and bypass the law. "The new law is more elaborate. It imposes penalties on those who resort to such tactics," said El-Dahabi.
On another note, other MPs argued that the new law is a step in the right direction to rectify many of the financial and administrative conditions of NGOs. "The reports of the Central Auditing Agency show the extent to which the vast majority of NGOs are involved in financial irregularities. They offer a very bad example of social work in Egypt," said Mohamed El-Masri, an NDP deputy for Daqahliya Governorate.
