CAIRO - Revolutionaries, some political parties and youth groups called on the Higher Election Commission (HEC) to bar all members of former president Hosni Mubarak's disbanded party from running in a parliamentary poll that starts later this month, in application of an administrative court ruling in a Delta city. The revolutionaries also urged parties fielding the remnants of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to purge them from their lists of hopefuls. “The administrative courts are always fair and their verdicts are the eye of the truth. However, lawyers and rights groups should take the battle to courts in order to bar all NDP members from running,” said Injy Hamdi, a spokesman for the April 6th Youth Movement. Hamdi, whose group was leading a campaign against the NDP members contesting the polls, added that “the election commission had to generalise the ruling to bar all those remnants, who corrupted the political life in Egypt”. The administrative court in the northern Delta city of Mansoura decided late on Thursday that members of the NDP should not be allowed to join the list of candidates. Many former NDP members have registered to run as independents or on other party lists in the first election Egypt has held since a popular uprising overthrew Mubarak in February. The court ruling could unleash a wave of copy-cat suits elsewhere in Egypt before November 28, when the first of three rounds of voting for the lower house takes place. The Free Front for Peaceful Change, a political group formed after the January 25 revolution, also called on the election commission to exclude the NDP members from the lists. “We call for the NDP members to be banned. We need a parliament without NDP remnants,” read a statement by the front. Also Al-Shehab Centre for Human Rights was filing lawsuits against NDP members in several courts across the nation to bar them from running in the polls. The Higher Election Commission said they had not received the ruling by Al-Mansoura court yet and that it would decide on how to implement it later. “The final lists will be delayed until the ruling is received,” a judicial source with the commission said. Former NDP members have set up at least six new parties and many have joined older conservative parties, angering activists who want to ensure that "counter-revolutionary" forces are kept out of the assembly tasked with writing Egypt's constitution. The Mansoura court orders the local electoral committee to stop accepting candidacy papers from former NDP members, but asks a judicial panel to decide whether those already accepted should be cancelled.
