THE UPROAR occasioned by Trade Union elections is coming to naught, writes Fatemah Farag, despite the estimated 800 petitions presented to courts by would-be candidates who claim the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU) prevented their nomination by refusing to issue the necessary documents. According to Khaled Ali of the Hisham Mubarak Centre for Human Rights, over 200 petitioners have won court rulings in their favour. "The Ministry of Manpower has not taken action in accordance with these court rulings claiming that the Administrative Court does not have the jurisdiction to issue such verdicts. Instead they are appealing against the rulings in the Abdin Court, outside whose jurisdiction they clearly fall," explained Ali. In the meantime workers have staged demonstrations at the GFTU headquarters and in front of Ministry of Manpower and Labour Offices nationwide. "No one expected court rulings to delay the elections or prevent fraud," says Gamal Eid, head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information. "But people are trying to push up the ante as far as they can." The hundreds who have court rulings in their favour have one of two options, says Eid. "They can either take the government to court for not applying the verdict and will most probably get a ruling calling for either the removal of the official responsible or a jail term for that official, though in the past such judgments have been ignored by the government." The other option is to bring the case before a civil court, in which case they have a good chance of getting compensation. "Compensation in this kind of case could reach LE10,000. Every year the government pays out millions in similar cases, including those involving electoral fraud in parliamentary elections. The Ministry of the Interior, for example, pays an estimated LE8 million a year to people in compensation for torture," says Eid. The Trade Union elections, which end today, have been characterised by the open participation of the Muslim Brotherhood and increased press interest. "The proliferation of privately- owned newspapers has resulted in better coverage of these types of story," says Eid. Kamal Abbas, head of the Centre for Worker and Trade Union Services (CWTUS), suggests that while the Brotherhood was not expected to make major inroads in worker circles the government was nonetheless keen on marginalising them. "When you consider that there are 150,000 committees, the smallest with seven members, the largest with 21, then we are talking about an estimated 15,000 seats being contested. The Brotherhood was never going to win many even though they were using the elections to flex their muscles," says Abbas. Abbas believes the real battle was internal, between the members of the so-called "old guard" of Egypt's only legal union. "Perhaps what really made the election stand out is that the heated battle has occurred at a time when the bulk of Egyptian workers are outside the ranks of the official union structure."
