The latest extension of emergency rule means Egypt will have been living under martial law for three decades, reports Gamal Essam El-Din The People's Assembly voted on Monday to extend the emergency law for another two years. The extension came in spite of promises, repeated endlessly in 2006, that emergency rule would be replaced by an anti-terror bill once the current extension expired. The emergency law, in force since 1981, grants police and security forces sweeping powers, allowing them, in effect, to hold Egyptian citizens indefinitely, without charge. Some 305 MPs voted in favour of the extension, and just 103 voted against. Addressing the assembly on Monday, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told MPs that the government had found it too difficult to draft an anti-terror bill in two years. "I told the assembly two years ago that I hoped the government would be able to draw up the bill in two years but the experience of other countries has served to underline that promulgating such a law without adequate study is disastrous," said Nazif. The main difficulty facing the government, said Nazif, was to strike a balance between public freedom and domestic security concerns. "The experience of countries like the United Kingdom, France and the United States has been one of continual amendments. They prepared their laws in a short time and were later forced to amend them again and again to achieve the required balance between the rights of citizens and the security of society. In Egypt we do not have the luxury of amending our laws every now and then and it is a tradition in our country that laws stay for long periods of time without amendments." Without deliberate irony the prime minister had made a case, of sorts, for the longevity of emergency rule. Nazif explained that the government had two options. The first, he said, was to request an extension of the emergency law in order to give itself enough time to prepare the anti-terror bill. "We need much discussion and national dialogue over a bill which will be instrumental in propelling us along the road to democratic reform proposed in President Hosni Mubarak's presidential election manifesto," he said. The second option would be to scrap the emergency law in favour of the existing penal code. "The government was not ready to embrace this. Ordinary laws would be unable to contain the winds of terrorism that are buffeting Egypt from every side." Nazif promised that the emergency law would be invoked "in the battle against terrorism" and drug-trafficking and not to limit political freedoms. Amid protests from Muslim Brotherhood MPs, Nazif appealed to MPs "not to allow the forces of evil and terrorism to undermine security and stability". Civil society organisations joined forces with opposition MPs to condemn the extension, charging the regime with using the 27-year-old emergency law to stifle protests and muzzle freedoms of speech. A statement signed by 103 opposition MPs said, "27 years of emergency rule have led to the proliferation of human rights abuses, including systematic torture in prisons and police stations." The statement argued that by extending emergency rule for another two years the government was tacitly admitting that for the last three decades Egypt had needed extraordinary laws to guarantee its stability and still needed such laws, hardly an advertisement for foreign investments. Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Nazif's justifications for the new extensions were "unfounded". The reason the United Kingdom and France were forced to amend their anti-terror laws, he pointed out, was not because they were prepared in a short time but because such countries allow "strict supervision from strong parliaments and independent judiciary", which is not the case in Egypt where, claims Bahgat, parliament is "toothless" and last year only two days were allowed to discuss and pass 34 amendments to the constitution. Bahgat argues that the existing legislation, which includes the anti-terror law passed in 1992 to help Egypt in its battle against militant Islamists, is enough to contain terrorist acts. "This law toughened penalties for terror crimes, granted security forces sweeping powers and broadened the definitions of terrorism," said Bahgat. Hafez Abu Seada, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights accuses the emergency rule of turning Egypt into, what he terms, a police state. "It reflects a mindset that prefers security interventions to political solutions for Egypt's many crises." Diaa Rashwan, a political analyst at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, believes that the government opted to extend emergency law because to abolish it would mean doing away with emergency courts. "It is not preparing a new anti- terror law that the government finds difficult," he says. "Their problem is containing the results of abrogating the emergency law, particularly the elimination of emergency courts." Muslim Brotherhood MPs complain that since 1981 50,000 of their supporters have been detained under the emergency laws. "Most of them have been arrested again and again for no reason while others were referred to emergency and military tribunals," says Brotherhood MP Mohamed El-Beltagui. Several NDP MPs said that emergency rule has proved an effective tool in combating terrorism and keeping Egypt stable. "Look around, at Sudan, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, and then give thanks to the emergency laws for saving us from such chaos," advised NDP spokesman Abdel-Ahad Gamaleddin. Saad El-Gammal, chairman of the assembly's Arab Affairs Committee, argued that martial laws were now more important than ever given the need to control Egypt's eastern border with the Gaza Strip in the face of Hamas's repeated threats to breach it. Some opposition MPs, including Ragab Hilal Hemeida, the sole parliamentary representative of Al-Ghad Party, surprised colleagues by suggesting that the emergency law is a lesser evil than any likely new anti-terror legislation. "Under the shadow of the emergency law, freedom of the press flourished, the number of opposition MPs in parliament increased and Egypt became more stable," he pointed out.
