CAIRO (AFP) — Egypt on Monday extended a controversial decades-old state of emergency by two years despite pledges to replace it by new legislation, in a move slammed by rights groups as anti-constitutional.
"Parliament has accepted during its afternoon session today the decision by the president of the republic to extend the state of emergency for two years starting from June 1, or until a new terror law is drafted, whichever comes first," the state news agency MENA said.
"It was passed with 305 votes in favour and 103 against," Issam al-Mokhtar, an MP with the Muslim Brotherhood, told AFP by telephone.
The state of emergency was first imposed in 1981 after the assassination by Islamists of president Anwar Sadat and has been repeatedly renewed since then despite protests from rights groups and regime opponents.
Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif pledged to "only use the law in the fight against terrorism... and to protect the security of the nation and its citizens," MENA reported.
"The government... has only used the articles of the law strictly for the goals intended, namely the fight against terrorism," Nazif told parliament.
Last year, Judicial and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Mufid Shehab said the state of emergency would end in 2008, even if the new anti-terror law meant to replace it was not ready.
"The state of emergency has for decades been one of the main causes of human rights violations in Egypt," Hafez Abu Sada of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) told AFP.
"This is anti-constitutional. The state of emergency is by definition put in place when the country is going though a period of danger such as a war or a natural disaster, which is not the case" in present-day Egypt, he said.
Egypt's authorities have used the state of emergency to clamp down on political opponents, including the country's largest opposition movement, the banned Muslim Brotherhood whose members sit in parliament as independents.
"We reject the extension of the state of emergency because there is no constitutional justification," Brotherhood political bureau member Essam al-Aryan told AFP.
He said the Brotherhood would now start a public awareness campaign about the law.
Last Tuesday, the state-backed National Council of Human Rights said there was no longer any basis for renewing the state of emergency.
"Nothing any longer justifies the extension of the state of emergency, all the more so as Egypt is experiencing a period of stability," said the watchdog headed by Boutros Boutros-Ghali who was his country's foreign minister before becoming UN secretary general in the 1990s.
The EOHR's Abu Sada said that awaiting anti-terrorism legislation was "a way of fooling people. There's already an anti-terrorism law from 1992 which can go as far as the death penalty. A new law will not stop violence or terrorism.
"If you let people express themselves freely, give them an active role in political life, then you will avoid recourse to violence and terrorism," he said.
Earlier this month, two dozen independent human rights groups also called for the state of emergency to be lifted, saying it "flies in the face of the comprehensive social, economic and political reforms underway in Egypt".
Political analyst Diaa Rashwan wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm that "10 anti-terrorist laws could have been drafted in the time since (President Hosni) Mubarak said he would lift the state of emergency".
He called the extension a "crime".
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