CAIRO – Egypt's Constituent Assembly on Sunday approved a new constitution that calls for more rights and freedoms as an increasingly police-like state played out in the streets.
Protesters angered by the police killing of a student on a university campus last week took to Cairo's Tahrir Square to demonstrate and were met by security forces who fired tear gas to disperse the crowd, and then moved military tanks into position to close off access to the square.
Meanwhile, the government announced that it would hold for another 15 days Alaa Abdel Fatah, a blogger who was instrumental in organizing anti-government protests in 2011. Fatah was detained Friday when police raided his home.
All the while, the Constituent Assembly's 48 members sat in a chamber and listened as the 247-article constitution was read aloud.
The new document promises freedom of religion, women's rights and outlaws human trafficking and the sex trade. But it also would enshrine the role of the country's strongman, Gen. Abdel Fatah el-Sissi, as defense minister for the next eight years, forbidding his dismissal by anyone other than the country's top military command.
The constitution also would prohibit religion-based political parties — a step that would make illegal any Muslim Brotherhood-based political group such as the now-dissolved Freedom and Justice Party, under whose banner deposed President Mohammed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected leader. It would, however, allow members of former President Hosni Mubarak's government, who were banned from holding office after Mubarak resigned in 2011, once again to run.
The approval of the new constitution — it still must be approved by voters in a referendum — at the same time that security forces were battling demonstrators in the streets showed the bifurcated state of Egyptian politics. The military-appointed government, seated after Morsi's July ouster, has presented itself as defenders of the 2011 uprising though the proposed constitution. But on the streets, the government has increasingly suppressed individual freedoms.
Egypt seems stuck between a government committed to reinstating old practices and an opposition that cannot move its cause beyond protests.
