The Ruling on Egypt's Parliament.

As previously mentioned yesterday (14/6/12) Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) ruled that parts of the election for Egypt's lower house of Parliament (Peoples Assembly) were inconsistent with Egypt's 1971 constitution and gave the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces the authority to dissolve the Parliament if they so wish.

I have to start by saying that I've had a lot of difficulty finding out exactly what the SCC's ruling was because they do not seem to have published a copy of their ruling in either Arabic or English. In a democratic country this is simply not acceptable. If a Court is going to over-rule the will of the people it must immediately publish a judgement explaining it's decision, the exact law under which it was being asked to make it's decision and the detailed reasoning behind it's decision.

However from what I have been able to piece together the part of the electoral process that the SCC had a problem with were rules that reserved one third of seats in the Peoples Assembly for independent rather party candidates. Although under Hosni Mubarak the Muslim Brotherhood gained a lot of experience in disguising party candidates as independents this rule seems to have been specifically designed to limit the number of seats that the Brotherhood's Freedom & Justice Party could contest and therefore win. As a result the SCC's decision to overturn this rule is likely to help the Muslim Brotherhood more then any other group. Also giving Egypt's interim military rulers the authority to dissolve Parliament does leave it open to accusations of mounting anti-democratic coup. Therefore I'm now convinced my earlier assessment was correct and the Muslim Brotherhood have managed to unduly influence the SCC's decision in order to increase their chances of winning this weekend's Presidential run-off vote.

The reason that the Brotherhood have resorted to these extreme and undemocratic tactics is that pressure has steadily been mounting on the Islamist dominated Peoples Assembly over the appointment of a panel to write Egypt's new constitution. This has really been the one and only job of Parliament since it's election in January 2012. However over the following six months the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist al-Nour Party have more or less blocked appointments to this panel in order to ensure that it is dominated by Islamists and Egypt gets a Sharia rather then democratic constitution. The Military set a deadline of June 7th (7/6/12) for Parliament to start work on final preparations for that panel. That deadline was met but still little progress has been made leading many in Egypt to suggest that the military needs to dissolve Parliament and allow the people to elect a new one in order to break the deadlock. The Brotherhood seem to be trying to force this decision in order to make the military look undemocratic.

As for the issue of the military dissolving Parliament I don't think Egypt's quite at the point that has become necessary just yet. However I do not have a problem with it in theory provided that on the same day the military announce that Parliament is to be dissolved they also announce the date (normally within around 6 weeks) that an election will be held to elect a new Parliament.

After all the entire point of democracy is that if the politicians are not doing what the people want the people can quite easily get rid of them. The recent recall election of Governor Scott Walker in the US state of Wisconsin is a timely example of how this can happen without the involvement of a military council.