CAIRO, June 14, (AFP): A senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm in Egypt on Thursday said a court’s ruling that parliament was unconstitutional was a “military coup,” in a statement on his Facebook page.
A series of measures, including giving the military powers of arrests, and then the court ruling were “a complete coup through which the military council erases the most honourable period in this nation’s history,” Mohammed al-Beltagi said.
Beltagi is a senior lawmaker with the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), which dominates the parliament that the constitutional court ruled was illegitimate.
The FJP won a crushing victory in the lower house of parliament elections, which were contested over three months between November last year and February, to clinch 47 percent of seats.
Beltagi was also referring to a decision by the justice minister on Wednesday to grant army personnel the right to arrest civilians.
The army took the job of policing during the uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak last year, when police largely disappeared from the streets following days of deadly clashes with protesters.
But their right to arrest civilians ended on May 31 when the controversial decades-old state of emergency was lifted.
The court decision comes two days before a presidential run-off which will see ex-premier Ahmed Shafiq face the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.
The rulings, two days ahead of the fiercely contested election between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi and the ousted Mubarak’s last premier Ahmed Shafiq, could throw the country into further political disarray.
A military source said the court’s ruling technically meant that the military, in power since Mubarak’s ouster last year, would assume legislative powers.
The ruling generals have been in closed session since the court ruling on Thursday afternoon.
“We don’t want it (the power) but according to the court decision and that law, it reverts back to us,” the source said.
The head of the constitutional court, Faruq Sultan, told AFP that the decision “voids” parliament and must be respected by the authorities.
“It voids parliament, not in the meaning of dissolves,” he said. “But the constitutional court’s ruling is binding on all state authorities and all people,” he said.
The court based its decision on what it said were illegal articles in the law governing parliamentary elections that reserved a third of seats for directly voted independents, or party members, and the rest for party lists.
Egypt’s military decided on a complex electoral system in which voters cast ballots for party lists which made up two thirds of parliament and also for individual candidates for the remaining seats in the lower house.
The individual candidates were meant to be “independents,” but members of political parties were subsequently allowed to run, giving the powerful Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) an advantage.
The court also ruled that a law drafted by parliament to bar senior former regime officials such as Shafiq from standing in elections was unconstitutional.
The law applies to those who served in the 10 years prior to Mubarak’s ouster on February 11, 2011 after an 18-day popular uprising.
FJP leaders went into a closed meeting after the court’s decision to consider their next option, one of them told AFP.
Their candidate Mohammed Mursi had just scraped by Shafiq to win the first round of the presidential election last month.
Outside the court dozens of people gathered to demand the application of the law, amid heavy security.
“That’s it, the revolution is over,” one protester shouted, as others chanted against the military.
“I reject Shafiq and Mursi, and if the court lets Shafiq stand or if there is a referendum on Mursi, we will go back to Tahrir,” the epicentre of protests that toppled Mubarak, said writer Samara Sultan, 30, before the hearing.
“We want the court to fix the parliament and the only way to do that is to repeat” the election, she said.
Ahmed Said, a film-maker from Cairo, said parliament was “full of people who use religion and don’t care about Egypt. We need people who can make a new Egypt.
“The elections were a fraud and we need the court to order them to be repeated. Shafiq is like Mubarak and we will never accept him,” he said.
Shafiq was initially barred from standing in the election in accordance with the law passed by parliament in April.
But later that month the electoral commission accepted an appeal from Shafiq against his disqualification and the case was referred to the court.
In the first round of voting on May 23-24 — which saw 13 candidates stand for the top job — Mursi won 24.7 percent of the vote, slightly ahead of Shafiq’s 23.6 percent.
The race has polarised the nation between those who fear a return to the old regime under Shafiq’s leadership, and those wanting to keep religion out of politics and who accuse the Muslim Brotherhood of monopolising power since last year’s revolt.
The next president will inherit a struggling economy, deteriorating security and the challenge of uniting a nation divided by the uprising and its sometimes deadly aftermath, but his powers are yet to be defined by a new constitution.
Seventeen Egyptian human rights organisations said on Thursday they are challenging a justice ministry order granting army personnel the right to arrest civilians, saying it had “no basis in law.”
“The decision creates extraordinary powers that have no basis in law,” the groups said, describing the order as “a blatant circumvention of the official end of the state of emergency.”
“The decision could put in place far worse restrictions than those of the state of emergency,” the statement said.
The decision came shortly after the lifting of Egypt’s decades-old state of emergency last month, and prompted immediate criticism from activists.
The statement, signed by groups including the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, said the organisations had called on the administrative court at the State Council to annul the law and prevent its implementation, which was due to begin from Thursday.