Egypt's National Elections Authority (NEA) has extended the final registration deadline for Egyptian and foreign civil society members and NGOs monitoring the country's upcoming presidential elections until Thursday 15 February at 5pm. The registration period was originally scheduled to end on January 26 before the NEA decided to initially extend to Thursday February 1, and then subsequently to Thursday 15 February.
The NEA announced on Saturday that 48 NGOs have received approval to monitor the upcoming presidential election, which is scheduled for 26-28 March.
Forty-four local and four international NGOs have been approved, in addition to Egypt's National Council for Human Rights and the National Council for Women.
The NEA published on Wednesday an initial list of presidential candidates who have submitted their candidacy documents, along with the numbers of endorsements they received, in the state-owned Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar newspapers.
According to the list, the presidential candidates are current President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and chairman of the Ghad party Moussa Mostafa Moussa.
Moussa presented his candidacy documents for Egypt's presidential elections to the NEA on Monday, just short of the deadline for candidate nominations.
President El-Sisi, whose current term will end in June, won the 2014 presidential elections in a two-man race with nearly 97 percent of the vote.
