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Fahmi Howeidi: Parliament Has Undoubted Right to Draw Up Constitution

An independent analysis confirms that Islamists represent only 48% in Egypt’s newly elected constitution-writing committee with non-Islamists representing a significant 52%.

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The Freedom and Justice Party’s official page on Facebook has posted an analysis that clearly shows Islamists altogether not exceeding 48% of total Constituent Assembly membership, including 36 from within parliament and 12 from outside.

A number of pie charts illustrate proportions of Constituent Assembly membership representations, composition and percentages, which indicates that Islamists are in fact less than half of the members, while they received 76% of the popular vote in Egypt’s recent parliamentary elections.

The illustrative graphs also indicated that the proportion of non-Islamists is indeed 52% (14 from within parliament, and 38 from outside), while they received only 24% of electoral votes.

Other classifications and categories of the constituent committee of the new constitution are as follows: 18 jurists, judges and lawyers; 15 researchers, intellectuals and writers; 15 university professors; 6 trade union heads; 8 young people "under 40 years old"; 6 women; 6 Copts; 4 workers and farmers; and 20 “Others” (Sinai, Nubia, those with special needs, representatives of various authorities".

Meanwhile, the Egyptian writer Fahmi Howeidi has published, in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk, a summary of a study by the American Princeton University, of 200 world constitutions written during the thirty years from 1975 to 2005. According to that study, there are 9 different ways or processes for constitution-making, and that the most widely used of those is where the elected parliament is entrusted to perform this task. That has happened in 42% of the cases studied.

The study indicates that the proportion of cases where the constitution was written by a constituent committee, appointed or elected by parliament, was in the range of 9%, and that constitutions were written by authors from outside parliament in only 17% of cases.

The study confirmed that in 51% of cases, parliament was either the author of the Constitution or the decision-maker with regard to the constituent committee or assembly tasked with the preparation and drafting of the constitution.