Al-Ahram Weekly Issue No. 252 21 - 27 December 1995
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Lawyer contests parliament .. yet again

By Dina Ezzat

Lawyer Kamal Khaled is planning to revive a legal battle which he first launched in 1990, to get a ruling from the Supreme Constitutional Court that the parliamentary election law violates the constitution. If he wins, the current People's Assembly will be disbanded.

"The recently-inaugurated parliament was elected on the basis of a law that is unconstitutional," Khaled told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It is a law that I have been battling against for the past five years.

He outlined what he views as a basic discrepancy between the election law and the constitution. According to Khaled, article 88 of the constitution stipulates that the entire voting process across the nation, in every principal and auxiliary polling station, should be under the full supervision of the judiciary. Meanwhile, Article 24 of the election law authorises the interior minister, who belongs to the executive, not the judicial, authority, to assign supervisors to the auxiliary polling stations under judicial supervision "This is an obvious violation of the constitution," Khaled claimed.

In October 1990, when he was contesting the parliamentary elections of that year, Khaled filed a lawsuit with an administrative court, challenging the constitutionality of the election law and requesting permission to take the case to the Supreme Constitutional Court. His objective was to have Article 24 of the election law modified so the entire voting process would be placed under the supervision of the judiciary.

In less than a month, Khaled won the necessary permission. The Supreme Constitutional Court requested its Supreme Commissioners' Authority - an advisory council to the court - to study the case and formulate a legal opinion.

But it was only in October 1994 that the Supreme Commissioners Authority recommended that the case be dismissed on the grounds that Khaled had won a seat in the 1990 parliamentary elections and that parliament was approaching the end of its term.

Unperturbed, Khaled insisted that the Commissioners Authority pronounce a legal opinion on whether there is a contradiction between the constitution and the election law. "But I did not get this legal opinion and the matter has not moved forward since then," he said.

Alarmed by what he called the "gravity of the violations committed by the executive authority in the recent elections", Khaled decided to reinstitute the case. "This week, I will serve the Commissioners' Authority with a legal warning, demanding that it express its much-awaited legal opinion in the space of one month," he said. If the authority does not respond, Khaled will initiate legal procedures to have the authority's members replaced. "It is like when a defendant requests the change of a judge whose impartiality is deemed questionable," he explained.

According to Khaled, the authors of the constitution specifically stipulated that the auxiliary polling stations be under the judiciary's supervision "because they knew that it is in those stations that most of the vote-rigging takes place".

Defenders of the election law, on the other hand, argue that since the auxiliary stations are affiliated to the principal station, then, in the final analysis, all polling stations are supervised by the judiciary. But Khaled rejects this argument, "which is based on an assumption of good will. The way things went during the two rounds of the last elections proves that the judge in charge of a constituency's principal polling station has no way of stopping rigging taking place in the auxiliary stations. He cannot monitor every station personally."

Both the 1984 and 1987 assemblies were brought down after Khaled won rulings from the Supreme Constitutional Court that the election law, on whose basis the assemblies had been elected, was unconstitutional. In the 1984 elections, the slate system was used, obliging the candidates of each party to run on a collective slate in each constituency. In the 1987 elections, the slate system was used again, but a seat was also reserved for independents in each constituency. The Constitutional Court condemned both systems as discriminatory against independents and, consequently, unconstitutional.

Khaled, who did not run in this year's election, is also providing legal assistance to about 100 defeated candidates who are demanding that the election results in their constituencies be annulled for alleged fraud. Their motion has been challenged by the government. The Supreme Administrative Court will hear the case next Sunday.

Yet, Khaled's ambitious plan may stumble over a basic constitutional block. "According to the constitution, only the president of the republic has the authority to dissolve parliament if it reached a dead end with the government over a major policy dispute, and a national referendum ordered by the president of the republic proves that parliament has lost the people's confidence. Abdel-Sattar, head of the legislative committee in the 1990-95 assembly, does not think that the dissolution of the 1984 and 1987 chambers was due to the Supreme Constitutional Court rulings. She contends that the president acted the way he did because he deemed it "convenient" to disband parliament in the circumstances.

It is now an open question whether Khaled will win a court ruling that might lead to presidential action.

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