Arab Laws Reform

(Press release - Of ponds and fish) Your pond need not be small for the big fish to make life miserable for smaller ones. The ruling party will be so big and powerful that the regime does not have to pose as an ill-famed one-party system. The ruling party will hold periodically scheduled elections, for example, it may even allow for establishing other necessarily smaller political parties under such conditions that you really do not have to rig the elections. Why take the trouble if the membership of the key administrative agency through which new political parties may be licensed is predominantly affiliated to the ruling party. In Egypt, it is aptly called the Parties Committee. The name is neutral, but this Committee holds wide discretionary powers, though not unlawful ones, for it came into being in compliance with the Law no.40 of 1977. Unsurprisingly smaller and less powerful political parties describe it as the committee that serves not for establishing new political parties but for preventing such from seeing the light.

As if the said law was not stringent enough, its amendment through the law no. 177 of 2005 rigged the establishment of new political parties even further. Now the lucky political parties that could make it through the maze of almost surrealistic requirements ended up so incommensurately small in size and so limited in influence that you have a multiparty system with stay of execution. Little wonder that, under such conditions, the smaller parties competing against the big one are so financially anemic and so prone to undemocratic intra-party practices. One handicap, among many, is that they all suffer from excessive reliance on family ties as a basis upon which their party's structure is built. Another hurdle is that the smaller parties' by-laws do not specify their decision-making mechanisms, nor does the finances of such parties allow for any significant institutional growth. And since what might be termed the Old Guard prevails in the leadership on both sides of the divide, the ruling party and the smaller parties, the person at the helm musters enough powers to dampen the spirits of both the party's rank and file and voters in general.

This being the case, and pursuant to previous deliberations held about a year ago with other Arab political parties in Beirut, representatives of 17 Egyptian political parties convened on May 31, 2009, to discuss a document on "The Mechanisms of Democratic Practice of Political Parties in Egypt", in cooperation with Friedrich Naumann Foundation. The document focused on the basics of democracy: separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, free and fair elections, and political pluralism. Chief among their targets is the abolition of the contentious law no.40 of 1977 regulating the status and functioning of political parties, and the dismantling of the paralyzing Parties Committee.