CAIRO - Like religious groups, whether Muslim or Coptic, Egypt's communists will not be licensed to form a political party, if they insist on limiting its membership to their comrades and no-one else. The ban has been imposed by the Committee for Political Parties' Affairs, which is authorised to issue birth certificates for the new political parties in Egypt. The committee was formed three months after the outbreak of the recent revolution. Anticipating the complaints of the victims of the ban, the committee's chairman explains that it is entrenched in the Political Rights Law, amended by Law 12 of 2011. Chief Justice Kamal Nafei denies that reports compiled by the security authorities will influence the committee's decisions. According to Nafei, who is also the deputy chairman of the Court of Cassation (the highest court in Egypt), the committee investigates the proposed new party's founder and its tendencies and its manifesto, before issuing a birth certificate. The new party's financial sources also play a big role in winning the heart of the committee, which will also decline to license a new one, if it discovers that its members are not from different governorates across the nation. Hours before the dramatic fall of Hosni Mubarak's regime, security authorities, with their reports, were given unchallenged power to bring political parties into existence. Those Egyptians who still espouse communism, even though it collapsed in the late 1980s, do not appear enthusiastic about forming an 'unalloyed' political party. Communism received a fatal blow when the old Soviet Union fell apart in the wake of perestroika, led by Mikhail Gorbachev. Communism has almost completely faded away in Muslim countries since the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and radicalism. A source inside the Committee for Political Parties' Affairs denies that Egypt's communists have asked for a licence. Since the revolution, only two parties have been licensed: Freedom and Justice and Al-Nour (Light). Although the Freedom and Justice Party was born of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the committee quickly stamped its birth certificate after discovering that 350 of its founding members are Copts; its deputy chairman is also a Copt. The founders of a new third party, the Freedom Party, have been advised by the committee to change its name, because the public will confuse it with the Freedom and Justice Party.
