Judges seem to be banking on a government promise that low-key supervision of parliamentary polls will result in the long awaited approval of their draft law. Mona El-Nahhas interprets their new stance Thousands of judges supervised the first stage of parliamentary polls yesterday. While unhappy with most of the conditions set by the Parliamentary Electoral Commission regulating the judiciary's role in the polls, the judges were complacent nonetheless. It was a far cry from the mood in the lead up to September's presidential polls, when judges vigorously defended their supervisory rights. In what was called "a judges Intifada", they threatened not to supervise elections unless they were given total control over the polls. The judges' high-profile battle with the Presidential Electoral Commission made the headlines for months, and in the end, most of their demands were met. One clear example was that auxiliary poll stations were, for the first time ever, subject to the direct control of members of the judicial bodies. In the past, state employees were in charge. Another was that the security apparatus, accused of committing electoral irregularities in past polls, was instructed to merely secure the polling areas without interfering in the voting process. After the elections, some of the judges who monitored the polls told Al-Ahram Weekly that they had doubts about both the fairness of the electoral process and the authenticity of the results. They said they saw numerous, and often flagrant, violations, which would be included in a report issued by the Judges Club. At certain poll stations, voters whose names were not registered on electoral lists were allowed to cast their votes without obtaining a pink voter registration card -- a constitutional prerequisite for voting. The phosphoric ink meant to guarantee that voters would not cast their ballots more than once was shoddy, thus negating its effectiveness as a fraud prevention tool. Despite these problems, the Judges Club sent a congratulatory telegram to President Hosni Mubarak hailing the "positive electoral process". The telegram ended up angering a majority of judges, Cassation Court Deputy Chief Justice Hisham Bastawisi told the Weekly. Bastawisi was also critical of the Judges Club report, which appeared this week. "The report failed to be decisive. It did not reveal whether it was for or against the electoral experiment." Although the judges seem dissatisfied with the parliamentary polling process, this time they aren't doing much about it. For one, they are unhappy about how the Parliamentary Electoral Commission itself was formed. According to Cassation Court Deputy Chief Justice Ahmed Mekki, the commission should not have included representatives from the executive authority like the ministers of interior and justice. Judges also complained that the commission did not take seniority into account when assigning members of the judicial bodies to monitor electoral stations. Another judges' complaint was that not all members of the judicial bodies who took part in yesterday's supervision were judges. "At least two-thirds of them are lawyers working for the state, which opens the door wide for the same kinds of violations that took place during the presidential polls," Mekki said. According to Bastawisi, judges were told that if they didn't make a fuss this time, their long-awaited law would very soon see the light. "That's why they decided to adopt the wait-and-see policy." Since the early 1990s, judges have been pressing for an amendment of the judiciary authority law that would ensure their total independence from the executive. The draft they submitted to the justice minister remained shelved for nearly 15 years. It was only this year that the minister referred the draft to the Supreme Judiciary Council for approval. The council, whose members are not elected, objected to several of the draft's articles, especially the one stipulating that judiciary council members should be elected to ensure they act as actual defenders of judges' interests. Bastawisi predicted that his colleagues would soon find out that the government's promise was nothing but a trick. "We've heard these sorts of promises for years, and yet nothing has happened." Even if the draft is passed, Bastawisi said, the resulting law would probably be a distorted version of the one they originally submitted.
