While People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour praised a full crop of new legislation, opposition MPs were more concerned about what parliament has left undone, reports Gamal Essam El-Din The People's Assembly concluded its parliamentary session last week with Speaker Fathi Sorour heaping his customary praise on the assembly's oversight of government business in the last eight months. Addressing the assembly on 16 June, Sorour produced a long list of what he termed parliament's achievements in its fourth session. "These were the fruit of the keenness of deputies to actively participate in the assembly's meetings, exercise supervision over the government's performance, and voice the daily problems and hardships facing ordinary citizens on the street," he told MPs. The assembly debated 155 laws, compared with 148 in last year's session, of which 112 concerned financial and budgetary matters and 43 political and socio-economic issues. As a result of the global financial crisis, said Sorour, economic issues had dominated debates in the 2008/2009 session. Sorour stressed that the assembly never acted simply to rubber-stamp new legislation proposed by the government. "The assembly has intervened on many occasions, changing controversial aspects of bills on judicial fees, telecommunications, competitive bidding procedures...etc. Laws also came to the assembly with constitutional defects which were then addressed. We thoroughly debated and revised these laws to ensure that they conform to the constitution and express the wishes of the people." Sorour identified the amendment of the People's Assembly law to reserve 64 seats in parliament for women candidates as the assembly's greatest achievement. "The message this law sends is that it is high time women began to exercise a greater role in political life," he said. Sorour also praised deputies for proposing bills. An unprecedented 95 bills were moved by members, of which five were approved. He concluded that "the bountiful harvest of laws was a result of excellent coordination between the Assembly and the government". It was an assessment disputed by opposition members and parliamentary analysts. Hussein Ibrahim, a Muslim Brotherhood MP, told Al-Ahram Weekly that "in addition to the fact that the legislative harvest was modest, coordination between the assembly and the government was poor." "Lack of coordination lay behind the delays in urgently needed legislation tackling monopolies, legalising organ transplant and formulating a new anti-terror law to replace the 28-year-old emergency law," said Ibrahim. The only real coordination Ibrahim saw between the majority of assembly members and the government was when it came to scuttling private members bills. "We proposed legislation on subjects such as gas exports to Israel and the lavish subsidies received by wealthy businessmen at the expense of the poor and all of them were defeated at the hands of NDP MPs and the government," said Ibrahim. "Some pressure groups such as the National Council for Women, led by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, have been able to impose their legislative agenda on the assembly while the opposition demands for political reform have taken a back seat," says political analyst Amr Hashem Rabie. Sorour pointed out that delay in passing legislation is often not the assembly's fault. "Sometimes the government takes a long time in preparing laws and sends them too late," he said, citing laws on regulating nuclear activity, organ transplants and the theft of antiquities. Sorour praised the assembly for exposing irregularities and corruption in government circles. "This was achieved by giving deputies the right to direct 43 interpellations, 26 information requests and 2,204 urgent statements," he said. "It is parliament that convinced the prosecutor- general to confiscate a shipment of substandard wheat and re-export it to Russia. Parliament also forced the government to improve the performance of the railway authority and relieve poor farmers from their banking debts." Sorour also boasted that opposition and ruling party MPs had exposed profiteering from public property and the waste of public money on inefficient land reclamation projects. Saad Abboud, a leftist MP, responded by arguing that attempts to use parliament's supervisory tools to combat corruption had been repeatedly stymied. "This was clearly the case when the assembly rejected to form a fact- finding committee to investigate the role of NDP businessmen in looting public property and exploiting their parliamentary membership to conclude profitable business deals with the government in violation of the constitution." Rabie agrees, noting that the NDP's majority shields its influential business tycoons from facing any kind of public scrutiny. Independent analysts have drawn attention to the increasingly bad-tempered tenor of parliamentary debates. "In this session we saw MPs repeatedly exchanging insults, as well as actually hitting their colleagues. Ruling party MP Omar Haridi accused independent MP Alaa Abdel-Moneim of acting like a prostitute, while Abdel-Moneim described Haridi as a whore." Rabie regrets that such exchanges have tarnished the image of the assembly, leaving many people to wonder why "MPs receive LE15 million in one another". "Such language is a reflection of the new intake of MPs who joined the assembly after the 2005 elections as well as the tensions that develop when MPs belonging to different political persuasions clash with one another," says Sorour. He said he had refused to refer many offenders to the Ethics Committee, preferring instead that they reconcile themselves. Sorour also accused opposition and independent MPs of exploiting independent satellite television channels to tarnish the image of the assembly, arguing that the trend reached fever pitch during Israel's attack on Gaza when MPs toured television studios to parrot the line taken by those Arab regimes and Islamist movements that tried to blame Egypt for the suffering of the Palestinian people.
