Rulings confirm electoral fraud
Court of Cassation rulings recommending that the results of
the 2005 parliamentary elections be annulled in some constituencies
promise to be a thorn in the side of the NDP's parliamentary majority,
reports
Gamal
Essam El-Din
When it opens on 8 November the People's Assembly will have to debate
the avalanche of court rulings that have questioned the results of the
2005 parliamentary elections in many constituencies. The Court of
Cassation rulings include cases of ballot box stuffing and the
intimidation of voters and lend weight to the allegations by several
civil society organisations that monitored the 2005 elections that they
were marred by widespread electoral fraud.
Last week the court said 1,050 appeals had been filed contesting the
results of the 2005 parliamentary elections. So far the court has ruled
the election results in 90 constituencies in Cairo and the Delta null
and void. MPs whose position is affected include several National
Democratic Party (NDP) business tycoons and veteran politicians.
Last week the court ruled that construction magnate Mohamed Murshidi,
NDP candidate for the professional ( fiaat ) seat in the south
Cairo district of Maadi, had relied on both the security forces and
supervising judges to win the seat.
According to the court, Murshidi won just 5,974 out of a total of
22,626 registered votes. Rival candidate Akmal Qortam, an oil tycoon,
received 9,648 votes. Yet thanks to the vote- stuffing intervention of
the security forces, the court ruled, "Murshidi was declared the winner
with a false count of 16,190".
In contesting the results Qortam said the presiding judge turned a
blind eye to the behaviour of security forces at polling stations and
during the count. Murshidi, the NDP's official candidate, is reported to
own apartment buildings in which many senior security officers have
flats.
A similar scenario was repeated in the Daqahliya governorate
constituency of Nabarooh. A report issued two weeks ago by the Court of
Cassation implicated senior judge Mohamed Siddiq Borhan in a plethora of
election irregularities and in manipulating the results in favour of the
NDP candidate.
The court found that the Wafd candidate Fouad Badrawi had been well
on the way to victory before "security forces swooped down on the vote-
counting station and began, in coordination with the presiding judge, to
change the results."
Siddiq first hit the news last May during the confrontation between
the independent Judges' Club and the state-controlled Supreme Judicial
Council (SJC).He attacked reformist judges Hisham Bastawisi and Mahmoud
Mekki, claiming that they had sullied his reputation by including his
initials in a list of judges implicated in vote rigging. When the
independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma (Voice of the Nation) published
the list of initials, Siddiq's name was at the top. As a consequence
Bastawisi and Mekki had to face a disciplinary hearing before the SJC.
Siddiq has also launched a case against Sawt Al-Umma, on which
a ruling has yet to be reached. In the meantime Sawt Al-Umma 's
defence lawyer has asked that the recent report of the Court of
Cassation condemning Siddiq's role in falsifying Nabarooh's elections be
taken into account.
The Court of Cassation has also ruled that election results in the
Cairo district of Nasr City and Heliopolis, stage of a fierce contest
between NDP construction tycoon Mustafa El-Sallab, and the Muslim
Brotherhood's Makkarem El-Deiry, a professor of literature at Al-Azhar
University, be annulled.
The court has yet to hand down judgement in a case filed in
Al-Beheira governorate constituency of Damanhour where Mustafa El-Feki,
president Mubarak's former secretary of information and currently the
chairman of parliamentary foreign affairs committee, fought an uphill
battle against Muslim Brotherhood candidate Gamal Heshmat.
According to Article 93 of the constitution any appeals
filed against election results must first be presented to the People's
Assembly which can then refer them to the Court of Cassation. The
results of the court's investigations are then submitted to the People's
Assembly. For its rulings to be enforced, the court's findings must win
a two-thirds majority of the assembly's 454 members.
Opposition politicians allege that the National Democratic Party
(NDP) regularly makes use of its majority to reject the court's
investigation. In the outgoing 2005, assembly three opposition deputies,
two of them belonging to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, were stripped
of membership while many high-profile NDP deputies remained members of
the house despite Court of Cassation rulings against them.
It is to end such anomalies that opposition parties have united to
call for Article 93 to be amended. They have been joined by the National
Council for Human Rights (NCHR) which said last week that Court of
Cassation rulings on election appeals should be binding.
As it stands, says NCHR Deputy Chairman Ahmed Kamel Abul-Magd,
Article 93 is used as an excuse by the assembly to ignore the findings
of neutral investigations conducted by the Court of Cassation.
