Constitutional legitimacy

By Hafez Abu Seada

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For 24 years Egypt has lived under a state of emergency. The emergency laws give the executive the power to withhold rights and freedoms enshrined in the constitution and suspend guarantees of personal safety, freedom of movement, the right to privacy, and due legal process. The emergency laws, in short, have supplanted the constitution. They also allow the executive to issue decrees that have the force of law. So far some 500 of these so-called military orders have been issued, many dealing with purely civilian matters.

There are military orders banning building on agricultural land, prohibiting the demolition of villas, criminalising the collection of donations and fixing the opening hours of commercial enterprises. If anything, this goes to show how little the emergency laws have to do with terror and drugs, as the government would like us to believe. Across the country roadblocks stop cars and search citizens and vehicles. This is done routinely, and in the absence of any grounds for suspicion yet, as everyone knows, such searches are legal only if the police have a warrant or strong reason to believe something is amiss.

The government has promised to replace the emergency laws with an anti-terror law. This news should be reassuring but isn't. I fear the government intends to give immense power to the executive in the proposed law. Should this happen we will have moved from a state of emergency to a time during which the state enjoys exceptional powers through ordinary law. The new law must be vetted by civil society organisations and political parties if we are ever to move from a state of emergency to one of constitutional legitimacy.

* The writer is secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.