Egyptian Democracy Support Network Update

September 4, 2005

In just three days, Egyptians will take to the polls in the country's first competitive presidential election, yet important battles over the transparency and thus the legitimacy of the results remain unresolved. Today, the Presidential Election Commission (PEC) maintained—even in the face of a September 3rd Administrative Court's ruling to the contrary—that civil society organizations and the thousands of domestic monitors they have trained will not be allowed to enter the polling stations on election day. This dispute is symptomatic of the many obstacles to transparency erected by the PEC and of a larger battle pitting a judiciary, which is demanding independence, against Egypt's all-powerful executive branch.

The Administrative Court's finding, in favor of three election monitoring coalitions composed of 34 local NGOs, stated that independent domestic monitors should be allowed to enter the polling stations. Nonetheless, Mamdouh Maray, High Commissioner of the government-appointed Presidential Election Commission (PEC), announced today that the court's ruling would be altogether rejected. Outraged at the refusal of a public official to uphold the verdict of a legitimate judicial body, the NGOs have filed another legal suit against Mamdouh Maray himself.

Moreover, the monitoring coalitions reiterated their intention to be a presence at polling stations regardless of the obstacles placed in their way. Observers intend to arrive with a copy of the September 3rd verdict in hand to presnt to judicial supervisors and if denied entrance, will monitor voter turnout and conduct exit polls from outside. At present, the PEC refuses to release the location of any of the 13,000 polling stations and continues to insist that the supervisory role of Egypt's judges will be enough to ensure the transparency of the election.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice has banned 1,800 of Egypt's most controversial or reform-minded judges from taking part in this supervision. And in a showing indicative of judicial outrage at the conduct of the PEC and Ministry of Justice, three judges from the board of the Judges' Club resigned today.

Despite the executive's best efforts, the complicity of judges has been impossible to achieve. The Egyptian Judges' Club—an 8,000 member de facto trade union—has taken a firm stance since declaring the May 25th referendum to be rife with fraud. On September 2nd, the Judges' Club chairman Zakariya Abdel-Aziz declared that the judges would supervise the election, but their endorsement of the results would be conditional. He maintained that if demands for judicial independence and electoral transparency are not met, the judges will, "tell the world that [they] cannot endorse the election's results." First on the list of demands is the presence of NGO-trained monitors in polling stations.

The Egyptian Committee for Election Monitoring (ECEM), organized by the Ibn Khaldun Center, is prepared to send roughly 2,500 monitors to polls throughout the country and issue a full report on its findings. The legitimacy of this election will largely depend on whether these and thousands of other domestic monitors are allowed to do the work for which they have been trained.