AF Chairman Field Marshal Tantawi's announcement on November 20th that the generals will surrender power to an elected president by June 30th, 2012 would mean that the drafting process of the new constitution would have to be drastically shortened. The Peoples' Assembly will convene in the second half of January and the Shura Council will hold its first secession on March 23, 2012. This basically gives the two houses of parliament roughly a sixty-day window to select a constitute assembly and write a constitution before the presidential election in June.
2. "Draft Declaration of the Fundamental Principles for the New Egyptian State," retrieved from http : //www xonstitutionnet.org/files/20 11.1 l_-_constitutional_principles_document_english. pdf.
3. New York Times, August 12, 2011.
4. Ahram, December 12, 2011.
5. This explains the insistence of the SCAF to ensure control over the government-owned media and their intimidation of independent media. The generals first appointed a fellow officer to run the state TV and Radio Conglomerate and when this was met with strong opposition, the generals restored the infamous Ministry of Information and appointed a trusted civilian to head it. When public opinion forced the SCAF to replace the minister of information, the generals selected a fellow high-ranking officer to replace him. The SCAF also closed down the offices of Al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr, part of the Al-Jazeera network that provides 24/7 coverage of Egypt, and the military police harassed a number of anti-SCAF TV channels. The pressure and censorship led Egypt famous talk-show host Yosri Fouda to stop his show for a couple of weeks.
6. "The role of the army in Egypt's new politics, "Aljazeera, September 30, 2011.
8. Raphael Israeli, "The Pervasiveness of Islam in Contemporary Arab Political Discourse: The Cases of Sadat and Arafat, "Ofer Feldman and Christ'l De Landtsheer (eds.) Politically Speaking: A Worldwide Examination of Language Used in the Political Sphere (Westport: Praeger, 1998), p. 22
9. Noha El-Mikawy, The Building of Consensus in Egypt's Transition Process (Cairo: AUC, 1999), p. 101.
10. Nathan J. Brown, "Egypt's Constitutional Ghosts," Foreign Affairs Blog, February 15, 2011.
14. "Egyptian Constitutional Declaration 20 11," retrieved from http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/constitution/default.aspx.
15. The powers of the Shura Council are rather restrained and generally advisory.
16. This Constitution also mandated workers' quota in other institutions. Article 26 stated, "The workers shall have a share in the management and profits of the projects. They are committed to the development of production and the implementation of the plan in their production units, in accordance with the law. Protecting the means of production is a national duty. Workers shall be represented on the boards of directors of the public sector units by at least 50% of the number of members of these boards. The law shall guarantee for the small farmers and small craftsmen 80% of the membership on the boards of directors of the agricultural cooperatives and industrial cooperatives."
17. The existing legal provisions define a worker simply as someone who is a dues-paying member of a labor union and receives his or her income solely from "manual or intellectual labor. " Nevertheless, determining who falls into this category was the sole authority of the regime dominated labor unions. In many occasions, labor classification was granted to unqualified candidates and withheld for real working class candidates. The same could be said about farmers. According to the Parliamentary Elections Law, anyone whose source of income comes from farming, resides in the countryside and owns no more than 10 feddans (roughly 1 1 Acers) of land can run as a farmer. Local agricultural cooperatives, under the administration of the Agriculture Ministry, have been the only entities authorized to grant candidates the classification. The result was excessive manipulation and misuse that permitted notable family chiefs to run as farmers even though they owned mu