Issue No. 594
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11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 Home news |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
'Toothless' parliament?
While People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour is full of praise for this year's parliamentary session, analysts are not so enthusiastic. Gamal Essam El-Din sifts through this year's legislative harvest
Parliament has been out of session for nearly a month now, but the speaker's report summarising the legislative body's achievements over its last session (2001-2002) has yet to appear. According to informed sources, Fathi Sorour is taking his time compiling the report in order to better "highlight the Assembly's performance in terms of legislative and supervisory achievements", in the face of a barrage of criticism accusing Sorour of turning the Assembly into "an autocratic and toothless institution".
Sorour
Addressing the Assembly on 18 June, Sorour showered praise on parliament's role as a legislative authority and government watchdog. The speaker cited a long list of sessions that took place "by day and night to debate and endorse laws over several consecutive weeks, the scope of which is unprecedented". Sorour said the Assembly had passed 159 laws, compared with 152 in last year's session. Of these, 128 dealt with financial and budgetary matters, and 31 covered political and socio-economic issues.
Political pundits, and opposition and independent MPs, however, saw things differently. They charged that deputies had lost their legislative powers long ago and that the Assembly always tows the government line. Independent MP Ayman Nour claimed that almost 151 of the 159 laws that passed were discussed and approved in just six weeks, since the beginning of May. "It has now become a tradition," said Nour, "that as many laws as possible are rammed through the Assembly in the two months preceding parliament's adjourning for summer recess. This period, Nour added, includes the passing of 'what we call the last-minute laws'".
MP Mohamed Abdel-Alim, a member of the opposition Al-Wafd party, was also quite disparaging regarding the assembly's late season rush, describing it as "the season of boiling laws". Explaining further, Abdel- Alim said, "It takes a very short period of time to boil food, which makes it tasteless. In parliament, this results in a plethora of half- cooked laws full of constitutional defects."
Sorour, meanwhile, seems to actually take pride in the fact that the 20-article money laundering law was passed in just 24 hours, the 61-article Special Economic Zones law was approved in 20 hours, and that three laws on NGOs, export promotion and the unemployment fund were passed in just 42 hours.
According to the Arab Strategic Report issued by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS), deputies from the ruling National Democratic Party "are instructed by their leaders to give automatic approval of government-drafted laws". The report blames the NDP's hegemony over the Assembly for parliament's shortcomings in both the legislative and supervisory fields.
Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour, the leader of the liberal-oriented Al-Wafd Party parliamentary bloc, meanwhile, lamented that the session ended without a discussion of several long-awaited political reform bills like the one aimed at addressing the inadequacies in the election system. Abdel-Nour also complained that all the proposals by independent and opposition MPs calling for the amendment of the Assembly's internal regulations were shelved. These regulations, said Abdel- Nour, eliminate MPs' abilities to exercise more effective supervision over the government's performance. "Actually," Abdel-Nour said, "they give the Assembly speaker great powers to manipulate the session in the way he, or rather the NDP-supported government, likes."
The ACPSS report confirms that the Assembly is geared to favour the interests of the NDP and the government, a condition made even more obvious when MPs were given the right to draft bills. According to Nour, while laws proposed by MPs are usually discussed at "a snail's pace", two laws submitted by NDP members during the last session were discussed and passed at "supersonic speed."
In fact, out of 78 bills drafted by mostly independent and opposition MPs, only seven were approved. Out of these seven, two were clearly in the NDP's favour at the expense of democratisation and political reform. The first was legislation limiting judicial supervision of polling stations for municipal elections. "This was deliberately passed," noted Nour, "just two months before the municipal elections, which the NDP won with a landslide 99.6 per cent victory."
The second, drafted by NDP majority leader Hussein Megawer, gave candidates who reached retirement age the right to run for the parliament's set number of workers' seats. This law was suggested after two years of rulings by several administrative courts annulling the parliamentary memberships of as many as 70 deputies -- mostly from the NDP -- because they ran for the workers' seats in 2000 when they were above the legal age.
Sorour also believes that the Assembly was successful in its role as an objective, unbiased watchdog over the government 's actions. Again, for Sorour, the numbers said it all. According to Sorour, MPs submitted as many as 158 questions, and an "unprecedented" 745 requests for information from government ministers, compared to 217 and 724 in the 2000 and 2001 sessions, respectively. He added that deputies took part in nine out of 25 interpellations (questions that must be answered) requested of cabinet ministers. The ACPSS report, however, charged Sorour with manipulating interpellations in order to cushion any serious criticism of the government. "It is no surprise," noted that report, "that interpellations dealing with such thorny issues as corruption in the banking sector, the proliferation of private monopolies and normalising agricultural relations with Israel were shelved by Sorour for many years."
The report noted that the Assembly's supervisory achievements should not be evaluated using figures and statistics, but rather by "how much the Assembly was able to influence the decision-making process, and how much it managed to project itself as a strong rival to the executive authority". The report added that most of the questions and information requests were "insignificant", and should have been discussed at the local councils level.
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