25 - 31 October 2001
Issue No.557
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 |
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Old law hounds aged MPs
The most recent court rulings against the legality of the membership of an additional three MPs promise to keep parliament busy when it opens next month. Gamal Essam El-Din reports
The People's Assembly will have to debate an avalanche of court rulings against the legality of the membership of many deputies when the parliament opens on 7 November. The latest rulings ordered that three deputies should lose their parliamentary membership on the grounds that they should have stood for election as fi'at (professionals), and not workers.
According to the court, the regulations are that a candidate cannot continue to be classified as a worker after reaching the retirement age of 60 and should be re-classified as a professional. The three did not follow this procedure. Several others are believed to have done the same, and potentially face a similar fate.
Another 22 deputies face losing their parliamentary membership for other reasons, such as having dual nationality, dodging military service, involvement in financial irregularities and illiteracy.
New elections are required to be held in any constituency whose representative forfeits his seat.
Two of the disqualified worker deputies are members of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), and the third belongs to the leftist Tagammu Party. Ahead of last year's elections, the Administrative Court ordered that the three, along with several others, were required to run in the professionals category. The candidates reacted by filing appeals with the Urgent Matters Court to win time and contest the elections. The Urgent Matters Court rejected the appeals and sent them back to the Administrative Court. The three deputies have the right to appeal the Administrative Court's rulings before the Supreme Administrative Court.
The two NDP deputies, Mahmoud Ibrahim and Abdel-Aziz Mustafa, hold the workers' seats in Cairo's downtown districts of Ezbekiya and Qasr El-Nil respectively. The Tagammu MP, Mohamed Shaaban, holds the workers' seat in the eastern Cairo district of Hadayek El- Qubba.
Ibrahim, 63, is a prominent NDP member and deputy chairman of parliament's Youth and Sports Committee. The court said late last month that Ibrahim had reached the retirement age in 1998 and was no longer eligible to run for the Ezbekiya workers' seat which he has held for 22 consecutive years. Ibrahim, a former worker at a public sector textile company, reacted by announcing that he would resign and run as a professional in the by-elections. Two weeks ago, however, he surprised political observers by announcing that he would not resign and would wait for a final ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court.
Mustafa, chairman of parliament's Manpower Committee for 11 years, also reached the retirement age in 1998. He is a former chairman of the state-owned Al-Chark Insurance Company. The court said Mustafa should not have run for the Qasr El-Nil workers' seat, which he has held for 22 consecutive years, because he is now chairman of a private insurance company and a member of the Egyptian Businessmen's Association.
The Tagammu's Shaaban, 67, reached the retirement age in 1994 and the court said that he should not have run for Hadayek El-Qubba's workers' seat which he has held for 11 years. Shaaban, a former worker at Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company, retorted that he has furnished the court with a document testifying that he is currently employed by a private textile company and, therefore, should be allowed to run as a worker.
Ahead of the elections, the General Federation of Trade Unions warned that as many as 100 candidates, out of the 222 fielded by the NDP for worker seats, are in fact businessmen engaged in private ventures or working in commercial professions.
The Administrative Court's rulings against the three deputies made many parliamentarians uneasy. The fact that similar rulings are expected soon against several deputies who had reached the retirement age some time ago aroused fears that parliament itself might be declared unconstitutional. The constitution requires that workers and farmers hold at least 50 per cent of parliament's seats. "A flurry of court rulings against worker deputies will mean that the number of professional (fi'at) deputies in parliament will be more than 50 per cent and this is unconstitutional," Ayman Nour, an independent MP, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Nour argued that the constitutional stipulation that one half of parliament's seats be reserved for representatives of workers and farmers should be scrapped. "This system was introduced by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1964 with the intention of empowering the two categories [workers and farmers] who supported the socialist principles of his regime," Nour said. "This should be scrapped because Egypt has switched to a full-fledged free market economy. Should it be retained, the terms of the two categories must be revised to reflect the changing times and conditions," Nour said.
According to Law 38 of 1972, a worker is a person who performs manual or intellectual labour (in the agricultural, industrial and public service sectors) and depends entirely on this work for his income. A worker cannot be a member of a professional syndicate or listed in the Register of Commercial Activities.
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