Egypt hoping for 'clean' poll

2005-08-29 09:29

Cairo - In the absence of international election monitors, the issue of how to guarantee that Egypt's first competitive presidential election is free and fair is taking centre stage.

United States President George W Bush has repeatedly called for international monitors for the September 7 poll, while Egypt has maintained there would be sufficient domestic monitoring to guarantee transparency.

However, several NGOs filed a suit on Sunday against the presidential election committee charged with overseeing the vote, for refusing to allow civil society monitors inside polling stations.

Meanwhile, the judges have yet to decide whether they are going to oversee the elections at all, since the government has so far failed to meet their demands aimed at guaranteeing a fair election.

Protest boycott

The judges' representatives will decide on Friday whether to stage a protest boycott of the monitoring process.

Their presence is an important measure of the election's credibility, but Mohammed Kamel, the media co-ordinator for incumbent and hot favourite Hosni Mubarak's campaign, stressed there would still be "100% judicial supervision" whatever the judges' decision.

"There will be a judge in every polling station," he said.

He explained that, according to the Supreme Constitutional Court's definition, a "judge" is not just a sitting judge but can also be an employee of a judicial institution, such as a state prosecutor.

That would leave enough manpower to oversee the 9 737 polling stations.

But judge Ahmed Mekki rejected the electoral committee's interpretation and stressed that a "long-standing tradition of fraud in elections" required professional supervision.

"We don't just want the elections to be clean, but also the image of the judges themselves to be clean," he said.

Monitoring the elections

The electoral committee has said only judges and representatives of the political parties will be allowed to monitor polling.

"Judges will be in charge of monitoring the election as well as delegates mandated by candidates," said committee spokesperson Osama Attawiyah, explaining that civil society groups would not be allowed to take part.

The electoral committee includes some judges but also public figures close to the government.

Sherif Mansur of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre stressed important work could still be done outside the polling stations to check voters were being allowed in freely and work out turnout estimates.

The Ibn Khaldoun Centre is part of the Independent Monitoring Committee, a coalition of 11 organisations that have already trained 1 500 monitors to work in the field during the election.

Another 500 monitors will be fielded by the National Campaign for Monitoring Elections (NCME), a coalition of four non-governmental organisations, which has accepted $264 000 in funding from USaid for their training programme.

- AFP