WATANI International
23 May 2010
On Tuesday 18 May, Parliament approved the extension of the state of emergency in Egypt for two more years. The government’s report said the extension was needed because of the current critical global political and security situations and the instability in some regions, in addition to the interference of some regional powers in Egypt’s internal affairs. This was obviously an allusion to the Hizbullah secret cell caught by the police in Cairo last year. The report also mentioned the escalating drug trafficking and the use of its revenue to fund terrorist activities. The extension of the emergency law then, according to the government, was required in order to guarantee Egypt’s national security.
The controversial law, which gives police wide powers of arrest, suspends constitutional rights and curbs non-governmental political activity, was backed a 308-member majority of MPs in the 454-member parliament. Forty-three MPs did not vote. The law is due to take effect on 1 June and runs till 31 May 2012.
Under fire
A government statement said the law will no longer allow authorities to monitor all forms of communication, monitor or censor media, confiscate property or evacuate and isolate certain areas. The government will be legally limited to using extraordinary powers for “the arrest and detention of persons suspected of being involved in crimes of terrorism and narcotics trafficking. It will also be able to restrict the freedom of public gatherings, transfers, residence and passage of people in specific places and times, cancel licences to bear weapons, arms or explosive materials of any kind, and confiscate them and close weapons stores.
The extension came under fire from rights groups and opponents.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the United States was “disappointed” about the move.
Human Rights Watch and opposition members slammed an extension to the law and said new restrictions on the application were merely cosmetic. “The government’s track record gives little reason for optimism for a shift in attitude,” HRW’s Heba Morayef said. But the fact that the government felt the need to address the issue of law’s application is a “sign that they feel under pressure, knowing that extending the emergency law makes them look bad,” she said.
“It’s just a new look for the old emergency law,” said George Ishak, a senior member of the National Assembly for Change led by Mohamed ElBaradei, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Egypt’s most high profile dissident. The law “will still be used against the opposition because authorities can accuse any of them of terrorism,” he told AFP.
The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights and the Arab Centre for the Independence of the Judiciary, in a joint news conference, condemned parliament’s renewal of the law. Thirteen other NGOs, in a joint statement, voiced alarm over the renewal.
The state of emergency was imposed in 1981 after the assassination by Islamists of President Anwar al-Sadat and has been repeatedly renewed since then.
Detained for months
The opposition fears the law will be used to crack down on regime opponents ahead of parliamentary elections later this year. Egypt is also to hold presidential elections in 2011.
“There are drugs in every street despite the state of emergency,” Shaaban Abdel-Aziz from al-Tagammu said. The Muslim Brotherhood’s MP Saad al-Katatni said the emergency law had not stopped continuous human rights abuses in Egypt throughout the last three decades, and had never overcame or aborted acts of terrorism which, he claimed, had disappeared from Egypt since 1997. Katatni said there was an obvious relationship between extending state of emergency and the coming elections.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an Egyptian rights group demanded the release of nine adherents of the Ahmadiyya sect detained last March under the emergency law and charged with insulting Islam.
Ahmadis believe that a 19th century Indian mystic, Mirza Gulam Ahmed, was the Messiah whose coming was predicted by the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. Traditional Muslim scholars consider them heretics.
“The arrest and interrogation of the Ahmadis is only the latest instance of the security apparatus’s abuse of the shameful, vague and unconstitutional provision on ‘contempt of religions,’” the statement said.