Group items tagged

ut my reading of the law, at least in the detailed version printed in Al Akhbar on Thursday, suggests that the changes are largely superficial and the new law retains many of the flaws of the old

people who set up parties can start operating 30 days after notifying the parties committee “provided the committee does not object”. In other words the committee retains a veto over parties that it considers do not meet the necessary requirements.

substantial restrictions appear to be largely unchanged

in a post-9/11 world, any non-state actor caught throwing a stone, be it the first stone or the thousandth, risks total warfare under the guise of counterinsurgency

Mass, sustained civil disobedience at the corporate headquarters of insurance 'providers' and banks and petrol companies remains a long way off. Instead, Koch-funded campaigns continue to succeed at electing Republican governors who then refuse federal money to build high-speed rail networks . (See Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and more to come. Special shoutout to New Jersey.) When Americans begin to thirst for health care, re-pedestrianised cities, and the return of usury laws with the same fervor that Egyptians have shown in clamouring for democracy and the rule of law, only then will we know the revolution is here.

The coming constitutional showdown between human law and divine law in the revolutionary Arab states may turn on the question of gay rights and sexual freedom generally

The problem isn’t that the revolution created this Mirage State, but rather that it has always existed from the days of Mubarak, which we always suspected but never believed, because things used to function due to informal structure that we created without noticing. The state used to function based on a network of connections; the economy used to and still functions based on an informal sector that no one can either measure or penetrate; the policing used to be carried out away from the law or true investigative work and more reliant on torture and jailing; politics used to be the domain of one party that would insist that it believes in democratic transition and values while always rigging elections; and the president used to do anything he wanted in the country no matter what the constitution or the laws stated

The illusion was so strong that they thought it was real even after it was destroyed.

Instead of resolving the issues that exist between the governorates and the trash collection companies, or using the help of the zabaleen community, who have been doing a remarkable job of being the informal trash collectors of Egypt, President Morsy asked the people to simply resolve the trash problem by picking up the trash. Fine, but take it where? No answer. Would that mean that we no longer have to pay the trash collection money added to our electricity bill, since we are the ones collecting the trash? No answer. Is this part of maybe some sweeping recycling initiative, where we create a huge recycling industry and quite possibly create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process? Nope. The plan is simply to pick up the trash and for Egyptians to engage in their civic duty in collecting trash that they pay to be collected for them in order to… eh… nothing.

young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil liberties

Political instability, bad governance, and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies have exacerbated longstanding societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support themselves and their families

Many are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation

As in the country, so in the barracks. Over the past six months, more than a dozen serving or recently retired mid- and lower-ranking officers have said they and their colleagues see Egypt's revolution as their own chance to win better treatment, salaries, and improved conditions and training. They are tired, they said, of a few very top officers becoming rich while the vast majority of officers and ordinary soldiers struggle.

"Military ranks struggle like the rest of Egyptians because, like Egyptian society, the wealth of the military is concentrated at the top and does not trickle down. You have to reach a specific rank before wealth is unlocked," one major said.

say they will hold off on pushing their demands further until the ruling military council hands over power to an elected civilian government

Food security policy has little room to manoeuvre in Egypt, where the per-person endowment of cropland is one of the smallest in the world. Virtually all 82 million Egyptians, along with almost all agricultural lands, are squeezed into just five per cent of the nation's total land area: A strip running eight to 15 kilometres wide along the Nile River and fanning out through the Delta. It's as if the entire population of the United States and all of our agriculture were clustered within 60 kilometres of the Mississippi.

There have long been laws against building on agricultural land in Egypt, but enforcement has always been lax. During the past year, with the government otherwise occupied, there was virtually no enforcement at all. Powerful economic interests have jumped into that vacuum, and land-grabbing and construction on cropland have accelerated. Economically stressed farmers have a hard time resisting offers of big money from aggressive developers.

it will not be easy to restructure a system that for decades fit comfortably into a thoroughly corrupt economy. For one thing, it will be necessary to deal with resistance from the food industries, interest groups, tycoons, and politicians who benefit from the current way of doing things.

“We were listening to the gun shots and we were asking the police officers to interfere but they had no clue. We are not secure in Sidi Bouzid, the police officers and the army are not accomplishing their duties here,”

“I know someone who was attacked by a salafist and when he went to the police office to complain, he was told to pray to God and ask for revenge,”

“We are living in ‘Bouzid-Stan!’ While I Am a practicing Muslim, what is happening here is not consistent with Islam at all. I know these salafist people, some of them were drunkards a week ago and now they are pretending to be the voice of God in Sidi Bouzid. Every mosque is preaching according to different extremist strands of Islam that in the past were foreign to here, we have a Wahabi mosque, a Salafi mosque, etc.”

This was the worst possible outcome of the elections: it is the prelude to the direct confrontation between the old regime and the Muslim Brotherhood that Mubarak warned about and used to justify—and win tacit international acceptance for—his authoritarian policies.

there is no constitution yet and nobody knows how much power the new president will have or how responsibilities will be shared between him and the parliament. The SCAF, expected to step down at the end of June after the president is elected, is now trying to issue a new, last-minute constitutional declaration to define the powers of the president, preempting the decision of the constituent assembly and the prerogatives of the elected parliament to choose who will write the constitution

in the middle will stand over 50 percent of Egyptians who did not vote for either Morsi or Shafiq, but for three candidates that represent, in their own very different fashion, an alternative

there remain questions about the government’s capability to provide security at polling stations. It has “deputized” a number of militias in major cities as part of its security plan. And there have been some very vocal calls for an election boycott in the east by Islamist and pro-federalism leaders, as well as attacks on election offices. The government reportedly has a plan to “freeze” the voting at polling places where there is violence or disruption, which could result in a de-facto invalidation of the results

The postponement of a few weeks was simply a technical delay. Libya’s transitional authorities were behind schedule in registering voters and in other preparations for the election. According to the accounts of the United Nations and several NGO observers, the delay was fully justified and not nefarious in any way.

for most of the main parties, the experience of campaigning and articulating a party platform is completely new. For many, the metric of voter support is how many posters are produced or media ads are running on television.  

members left the Assembly last week for their first break since they began writing in February. Just before their departure, the publication of the first full draft of the constitution demonstrated marked progress, but the contents of the draft have caused controversy throughout the country. The draft revealed that divisive issues, such as the status of women, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the parliamentary structure of the government, are still far from settled inside and outside of the NCA. The Assembly will reconvene in early September to negotiate these divisions, but the timeframe for the ratification of the constitution remains unclear.

We secured ourselves and our connections, but I can tell you in many cases we didn’t for different reasons: slow connections, the need to update from a public device, etc. Luckily, the state security were not that smart, because I know ways in which they could have pinpointed our location and identity, but they didn't. Even the arrest of Wael Ghonim, as far as I know, was not related to his Khaled Said activity; it was something that was discovered during their interrogation of him on a different matter.

During the revolution I was the only person using their real account to administer the page, so I was terrified and took extra measures

Facebook in Egypt is very limited in its outreach. You can only reach certain areas (mostly neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria) and a certain segment (the middle class youths). We had only around 400,000 members on the page, mostly from Giza and the surrounding region, and mostly in their twenties and 30s. This is a very homogeneous group, but, clearly, given some conditions, they can start something significant.

The administrative courts or the Supreme Constitutional Court might indeed refuse to honor Morsi’s addendum. But unless there is strong opposition from a powerful political force (and the most likely opponent, the SCAF itself, seems to be going along with the president instead), a court taking such a move would be bold indeed.

The same co-governance is in place, but with the president as the more powerful actor. Indeed, by cancelling the June 2012 constitutional addendum Morsi has now legally reinserted himself as chairman of the SCAF itself

Morsi’s selection of a Mahmud Makki, a prominent judge, as vice president—after selecting Mahmud’s older brother Ahmad as minister of justice—may be an attempt to outmaneuver judicial opposition. The Makki brothers were both prominent members of the 2005 judicial reform movement and thus have some credibility in circles opposed to the old regime. Both were also rumored to have mild Islamist inclinations, though such rumors are hard to evaluate since judges rarely disclose their partisan feelings even when they have them. But the placement of prominent judges in such positions—and the brief floating of a suggestion that the new justice minister draft a new judicial law to be issued by presidential decree (not waiting for the new parliament)—may be a way of signaling to the judiciary that accommodation rather than a full frontal assault may be a better strategy for those anxious about the presidency and the Islamist rise. Whether a presidency at least momentarily free of strong checks on its authority will set its sights on restructuring the judiciary is not yet clear—but judges will definitely be scouring presidential statements and decisions for indications of Morsi’s intentions

Article 5: Articles of the draft constitution should be reached by consensus among assembly members. If this proves impossible, articles should be determined by vote

In Egypt, where the leadership continues to rely on a decades-old emergency law that allows arrest without charge, there is a lot of room for free and critical speech, offering a safety valve for expression that did not exist in Tunisia, he said.