Egypt’s Ruler Pledges to End State of Emergency

In a speech on state television today, the leader of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) announced plans to end the nation’s 30-year-old state of emergency on January 25, the one-year anniversary of Egypt’s revolution. The state of emergency stems from Egypt’s so-called “Emergency Law,” adopted in the late-1950s and reinstated by former President Hosni Mubarak after the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Al Sadat. The Emergency Law gives police wide-ranging powers of extra-judicial arrests, detentions, and censorship. Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi said the law’s measures would be limited to crimes committed by “thugs,” though rights lawyers responded that the SCAF has applied that term broadly in the past year. Nathan Brown argues in Foreign Policy Magazine that Tantawi pledged to end the state of emergency, not the Emergency Law itself, meaning that the law would remain and could be reactivated at any time. Therefore, it will be the job of the President and Egypt’s parliament to finally repeal the law itself after its latest renewal ends in June 2012.

Authors Christopher Walker and Robert Orttung argue that Egypt is moving backwards in terms of media freedom, and that Egyptian state media “continues to act as a drag on Egypt’s democratic aspirations.”  In a similar piece, Amnesty International reports that a number of Egyptian political parties refused to sign on to their “Human Rights Manifesto,” which includes a commitment to advancing women’s rights. The press release noted that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, which holds a near-majority in parliament, did not respond to the initiative. Writing for Politico, John Bresnahan explains the role of pro-SCAF lobbyists in America who defended raids on the offices of Egyptian nongovernmental organizations, including those funded by the U.S. government. One lobbyist’s talking points read, “[there] are foreign NGOs working in Egypt without being licensed” and “no organizations… should be allowed to operate outside the law.” Egyptian officials recently proposed a new NGO law which critics say is more repressive than the current.  In letters from both houses of Congress, lawmakers reminded Tantawi that the aid to Egypt from the 2012 appropriations bill is conditioned upon the SCAF achieving certain democratization benchmarks.