President gives PM power to review Morsi pardons

Interim President Adly Mansour gave the prime minister the power to review all pardons issued by deposed president Mohamed Morsi Sunday, the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm reported.

Morsi pardoned 572 prisoners on the occasion of last Ramadan, including 25 former jihadists and members of the Jama’a al-Islamiya, a group that broke off from Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi belongs, and engaged in a violent insurgency before its leadership renounced violence from prison.

That pardon included those convicted in a large case concerning Egyptians returning from Afghanistan in 1992, as well as cases tied to bomb attacks in Sinai and Zeitouna.

According the presidential decree, Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi will be responsible for reviewing pardons issued by Morsi between June 30, 2012 and July 3, 2013.

The six-article decree will also be applied to new pardons. Article 3 states that the assistant interior minister for prisons will head a committee that will produce names of prisoners eligible for pardon.

If those prisoners are pardoned, they can be monitored by the police for a period no more than five years. Article 2 says prisoners must have shown good conduct while incarcerated and that their release is not a national security threat. The same article says that the released is still committed to financial obligations and fines he or she held before release.