Egypts Parliamentary Elections 2011 2012 PDF Download

"The November 2010 People's Assembly elections will be key for assessing the Egyptian authorities' tolerance of free and fair elections, in advance of the critical presidential elections scheduled for 2011. Much stands in the way of voters' ability to express their will at the polls. The longstanding Political Parties Law sets out vague and subjective criteria for forming new parties that allow the government to stop interested groups in their tracks. Since 1981, Egypt has been under the Emergency Law, whose powers security forces used throughout 2010, and especially in the weeks leading up to the November 28 parliamentary elections, to disrupt and prevent gatherings and to arrest individuals solely for exercising their rights to freedom of association, assembly, and expression--freedoms essential to free and fair elections. Authorities particularly targeted the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting more than 1,000 members in the weeks preceding the elections. In 2010, unlike in elections of the past decade, the government drastically limited independent judicial supervision of polling, following constitutional amendments in 2007 that further eroded political rights. The government rejected calls for international observers, terming their presence an intervention in Egypt's domestic affairs, and instead insisted that Egyptian civil society organizations monitor elections. Yet in the past, in advance of the June 1, 2010 elections to the upper house of Parliament, the High Elections Commission rejected 65 percent of the monitoring requests from civil society groups. Four days before the November elections, two coalitions of human rights organizations that submitted over 2,000 requests for monitoring permits had yet to receive any response."--P. [4] of cover.