Egypt Constitution Sparks Outrage

Draft Is Illegitimate, Critics Say; Islamists Plan Rival Protest

By SAM DAGHER

Critics of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi slammed the country's draft constitution after it emerged from a hasty all-night session, with opponents charging the document was a jumbled attempt to impose Islamic law produced by what they called an unrepresentative body dominated by Islamists.

The draft charter, which the president has vowed to put to a national vote soon, emerged a week after Mr. Morsi issued a decree broadly expanding his powers, spurring violent rallies against the president in the worst crisis of his five-month term. The battle is expected to play out in coming days both in Egypt's courts, where judges will hear challenges to Mr. Morsi's decree, and in the streets, where supporters and opponents have been laying plans for large rallies.

The draft constitution was finished early Friday by Egypt's 100-member Constituent Assembly, a body that had been conceived as representing Egyptians broadly. The group became dominated by Islamist politicians, however, after it was boycotted by Christian and secular members who had made up more than one-quarter of it. The assembly, bolstered with replacement members, sprinted to complete the draft ahead of a scheduled hearing Sunday in the country's top court, where the assembly itself faces a challenge as unrepresentative and unconstitutional.

Assembly chairman Hossam El Gheriany said early Friday that he and 85 members would hand-deliver the document on Saturday to President Morsi, who would then announce the date for a national referendum. The vote would be held by mid-December, several government officials and members of the panel said.

Mixing Religion and Politics

Some of the more controversial articles in the proposed Egyptian constitution:

·        Article 2: Says that Islam is the religion of the state and that principles of Islamic Shariah are the primary source of legislation.

·        Article 11: The state has power to issue unspecified laws that regulate 'public morality, discipline and order.

·        Article 150: President can call binding referendum on 'important matters related to the state's paramount interests.

·        Article 198: Military tribunals can try civilians for crimes 'that harm the armed forces.'

"Completing this historic step represents important progress for Egypt and its people," said the Muslim Brotherhood, the main party in Mr. Morsi's Islamist coalition.

The question for Mr. Morsi and his allies is whether they can overcome a barrage of opposition that has grown in the past week and now includes representatives of the judiciary, youth and liberal and secular forces, and also many Christians, moderate Islamists and a large cross-section of the population that considers itself independent.

"We are watching, we are sitting in and we are rejecting a shameful constitution," read a large banner in Cairo's central Tahrir Square, where tens of thousands of people flocked Friday to demand an end to the document, the panel that drafted it and the extraordinary powers Mr. Morsi gave himself.

"We consider the current project for a constitution illegitimate from the standpoint of form and content," the National Salvation Front of opposition political parties, which was formed to confront Mr. Morsi's decree, said in a statement read Friday on Tahrir Square by politician Mohammed ElBaradei. The square has been filled, for eight days, by thousands of Mr. Morsi's opponents.

The president's Islamist supporters, who had largely stayed off the streets in the past week, came out in processions around the country Friday. They are planning a massive gathering Saturday outside the main campus of Cairo University to rally around "Shariah [Islamic law] and legitimacy," as described by parties in the governing Islamist coalition.

Many legal experts said they saw major ambiguities and contradictions in several articles dealing with the role of Shariah, or Islamic law; the powers of the president and the legislature; the nature of the judicial and electoral systems; and the establishment of regulatory and oversight bodies and agencies.

The Supreme Constitutional Court is expected to convene Sunday to take up a case asking to disband the Constituent Assembly, which was formed by the Islamist-dominated lower chamber of Parliament. It was later dissolved by the same court when Egypt was ruled by the interim military that preceded Mr. Morsi's rule.

Many Egyptian legal experts now expect the constitutional court to postpone its case on the body itself, while the administrative branch of the judiciary hears more than a dozen separate lawsuits filed against the decree Mr. Morsi issued last week shielding his own decisions and those of the Constituent Assembly from the judiciary.

If the court finds the Morsi decree is unconstitutional, it could then consider the status of the assembly.

On Friday, a group of judges with the State Council, the body overseeing the administrative judiciary, issued a statement lambasting Mr. Morsi's decree as "worthless" and "null and void."

Several articles introduced to the constitution this week are already provoking a backlash among many Egyptians.

"Every section tacitly bolsters Islamic rule in Egypt, whether politically or socially," says George Messiha, a member of the dissolved parliament and Coptic Christian, who was among the 26 who boycotted or resigned from the Constituent Assembly before the vote on the constitution Friday.

Also under scrutiny is an article banishing members of the former ruling party of ousted president Hosni Mubarak from political life for 10 years.

Many Morsi opponents who flocked to Tahrir Square on Friday said the president is forcing Egyptians to choose between living with his decrees or accepting a constitution drafted mainly by Islamists.

"He gave us a choice between something that smells bad and something that smells very bad," said Hani Sabet, a retired music producer who came to the square with his wife, Rosemary, a dramatist and novelist.