50 or 10?: Legal experts walk out of constitution session

The committee of 10 legal experts and judges who conducted a first round of amendments on the 2012 constitution walked out of a meeting with its successor committee on Tuesday, both Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Shorouk privately-owned newspapers reported.

According to the newspapers, the 50-member committee which is now doing a last round of amendments before a referendum is conducted in December, suggested that the members of the committee of 10 should not vote over the final draft, which prompted them to pull out from the Tuesday meeting.

The privately-owned news agency ONA also reported that besides the voting, the 10 members contested some of the 50-member committee's decisions with regards to the judicial authority. In particular, the committee of 50 have decided to reduce the functions of the State Council, counter to the original plans of the first committee. In the stipulations of the 50-member committee, judicial disciplinary boards, which are normally within the jurisdiction of the State Council, would now be deferred to the Administrative Prosecution, which answers to the executive branch. The move caused a fury among judges.

Some concerns were expressed over initial discussions in the 10-member committee which some felt would shield the judiciary and give it too many powers. A case in point is the Supreme Constitutional Court, which has expressed its reservation on defining the number of its justices in the constitution, saying that it should be up to the court's general assembly to define this detail. The 2012 Constitution drafted by a mostly Islamist constituent assembly had limited the number of the court's judges to 10, hence side lining a number of top judges.

Tensions between the two committees have been apparent since there was contention on whether the 10-expert committee's work will be developed by the 50-member committee, with the latter maintaining that amending the 2012 constitution was not enough, and it should be redrawn completely.

In an interview published last month with Al-Masry Al-Youm, legal expert and professor of constitutional law professor Ibrahim Darwish explained that the 50-member committee should not draw on the work of its predecessor because of its contradictions. “They understood the constitution as a legal document, but instead it should be a social, political and economic document,” he told the newspaper.

Observers have criticized the constitution writing process. As stipulated by the pro-military government, 10 legal experts were mandated with doing the first series of amendments on the constitution, followed by the 50-member committee, which is a more diverse group of experts spanning different fields. The criticism rests in particular on the sequence — critics argue that as a technical team, the legal experts’ job should have come following the 50-members committee in order to fine-tune the document legally after the first committee addresses its different social, economic and political aspects.