Middle East Online - 11 May 2010
Egyptian protesters gather outside parliament to call for end to long state of emergency.
CAIRO – Egypt’s parliament voted on Tuesday to extend a decades-old state of emergency for a further two years, the official MENA news agency reported.
“The People’s Assembly has approved by a 308-member majority the presidential decree to extend the state of emergency for a period of two years,” MENA said.
A parliamentary said that 103 MPs had voted against the extension of the controversial emergency law, which MENA said is due to take effect on June 1 and run until May 31, 2012.
The People’s Assembly has 454 members. It was not immediately clear whether the remaining 43 lawmakers had not attended the session or abstained from voting.
Egypt’s emergency law, in place since 1981, gives police extended powers of arrest, suspends constitutional rights and curbs non-governmental political activity. Special courts set up under the law deny a right of appeal.
It has repeatedly come under harsh criticism from rights groups and regime opponents.
Earlier, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif had asked parliament to extend the law, but sought to reassure critics by pledging only to apply it to cases of terrorism and narcotics.
The law has repeatedly come under fire from international rights groups, who say that thousands of prisoners have been detained without charge, many for over a decade.
The state of emergency was imposed in 1981 after the assassination of president Anwar Sadat and has been repeatedly renewed since then despite protests from local and international rights groups and regime opponents.
Egypt’s authorities have used the state of emergency to clamp down on political opponents, including the country’s largest opposition movement, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, whose members sit in parliament as independents.
Protesters, among them parliamentarians affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and members of other secular opposition movements, gathered outside parliament to to call for an end to the state of emergency.
Some held posters depicting a skeleton to symbolise the Egyptian people with a noose — the emergency law– around its neck.
Others held signs reading “Mubarak says we are a stable country but the NDP says we are in a state of emergency.”
The government has since 2005 been saying it would replace the emergency law with new anti-terror legislation.
On Monday, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc Hamdy Hassan told said that “the government has already made clear its intention to extend the state of emergency.”
Last month, Egyptian police beat up demonstrators demanding an end to the emergency law and dozens were arrested.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch last month condemned the law as “abusive.”
“The unfettered powers granted to the government to detain anyone they want, at any time, for just about any reason makes real political reform in Egypt impossible,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
“If the government renews this law once again in May, it will only perpetuate its abusive, unchecked rule over the people of Egypt.”
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.
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