CAIRO - The appeals committee at the Higher Elections Commission (HEC) received 101 appeals from candidates whose forms have been excluded, because the details were incomplete or because they didn't stick to the rules stipulated in the applications. The head of the HEC's technical and monitoring office, Youssri Abdel-Karim, said that some candidates (hoping to run either as individuals or according to the slate system) have had their applications accepted, while others have had their applications rejected. He added that each candidate, accepted to run in the elections, will be assigned a symbol on November 8, whether they are running as individuals or according to the slate system. According to senior judicial sources, the candidates whose forms have been excluded have the right to file lawsuits at the Administrative Court. Meanwhile, the HEC held a meeting yesterday to discuss how to implement an Administrative Court ruling that gives expatriates the right to vote in the next parliamentary elections. They are considering a mechanism to allow Egyptians who live abroad to vote using their passports instead of their identity cards. Meanwhile, US Michele Dunne, a director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East, has recently been quoted by the www.cfr.org that Egypt has experienced a ‘half-revolution', with demonstrators handing over power to the military, which, to begin with, sided with the demonstrators against Mubarak, in order to avoid more chaos and violence, but she argued that the transition in Egypt ‘is not going all that well'. She added that the Military Council has agreed that the parliamentary elections will start on November 28 as planned. It's going to be a very long electoral process, lasting until March 2012, when the Parliament will finally be selected. According to her, the military has not yet fixed a date for the presidential elections, because it seems that the military is not comfortable handing over executive power to a civilian president. Dunne sees many differences between what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia. The transition of power in Tunisia is going smoothly, because the Tunisian Army has retreated and given civilians the chance to take power; however, in Egypt, the army is trying to put many obstacles in the way of the transition. According to the Middle East News Agency (MENA), some human rights activists in Egypt will run in the parliamentary elections, banking on their role in the revolution and promoting human rights. Hafez Abu Seada, the head of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights and a member of the National Human Rights Council, has decided to run in the forthcoming elections, although rights observers have criticised him for this. Activists George Ishaq and Nasser Amin will also run in the People's Assembly elections.
