Court of Cassation rulings recommending that the results of the 2005 parliamentary elections be annulled in some constituencies promise to be a thorn in the side of the NDP's parliamentary majority, reports Gamal Essam El-Din When it opens on 8 November the People's Assembly will have to debate the avalanche of court rulings that have questioned the results of the 2005 parliamentary elections in many constituencies. The Court of Cassation rulings include cases of ballot box stuffing and the intimidation of voters and lend weight to the allegations by several civil society organisations that monitored the 2005 elections that they were marred by widespread electoral fraud. Last week the court said 1,050 appeals had been filed contesting the results of the 2005 parliamentary elections. So far the court has ruled the election results in 90 constituencies in Cairo and the Delta null and void. MPs whose position is affected include several National Democratic Party (NDP) business tycoons and veteran politicians. Last week the court ruled that construction magnate Mohamed Murshidi, NDP candidate for the professional ( fiaat ) seat in the south Cairo district of Maadi, had relied on both the security forces and supervising judges to win the seat. According to the court, Murshidi won just 5,974 out of a total of 22,626 registered votes. Rival candidate Akmal Qortam, an oil tycoon, received 9,648 votes. Yet thanks to the vote- stuffing intervention of the security forces, the court ruled, "Murshidi was declared the winner with a false count of 16,190". In contesting the results Qortam said the presiding judge turned a blind eye to the behaviour of security forces at polling stations and during the count. Murshidi, the NDP's official candidate, is reported to own apartment buildings in which many senior security officers have flats. A similar scenario was repeated in the Daqahliya governorate constituency of Nabarooh. A report issued two weeks ago by the Court of Cassation implicated senior judge Mohamed Siddiq Borhan in a plethora of election irregularities and in manipulating the results in favour of the NDP candidate. The court found that the Wafd candidate Fouad Badrawi had been well on the way to victory before "security forces swooped down on the vote- counting station and began, in coordination with the presiding judge, to change the results." Siddiq first hit the news last May during the confrontation between the independent Judges' Club and the state-controlled Supreme Judicial Council (SJC).He attacked reformist judges Hisham Bastawisi and Mahmoud Mekki, claiming that they had sullied his reputation by including his initials in a list of judges implicated in vote rigging. When the independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma (Voice of the Nation) published the list of initials, Siddiq's name was at the top. As a consequence Bastawisi and Mekki had to face a disciplinary hearing before the SJC. Siddiq has also launched a case against Sawt Al-Umma, on which a ruling has yet to be reached. In the meantime Sawt Al-Umma 's defence lawyer has asked that the recent report of the Court of Cassation condemning Siddiq's role in falsifying Nabarooh's elections be taken into account. The Court of Cassation has also ruled that election results in the Cairo district of Nasr City and Heliopolis, stage of a fierce contest between NDP construction tycoon Mustafa El-Sallab, and the Muslim Brotherhood's Makkarem El-Deiry, a professor of literature at Al-Azhar University, be annulled. The court has yet to hand down judgement in a case filed in Al-Beheira governorate constituency of Damanhour where Mustafa El-Feki, president Mubarak's former secretary of information and currently the chairman of parliamentary foreign affairs committee, fought an uphill battle against Muslim Brotherhood candidate Gamal Heshmat. According to Article 93 of the constitution any appeals filed against election results must first be presented to the People's Assembly which can then refer them to the Court of Cassation. The results of the court's investigations are then submitted to the People's Assembly. For its rulings to be enforced, the court's findings must win a two-thirds majority of the assembly's 454 members. Opposition politicians allege that the National Democratic Party (NDP) regularly makes use of its majority to reject the court's investigation. In the outgoing 2005, assembly three opposition deputies, two of them belonging to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, were stripped of membership while many high-profile NDP deputies remained members of the house despite Court of Cassation rulings against them. It is to end such anomalies that opposition parties have united to call for Article 93 to be amended. They have been joined by the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) which said last week that Court of Cassation rulings on election appeals should be binding. As it stands, says NCHR Deputy Chairman Ahmed Kamel Abul-Magd, Article 93 is used as an excuse by the assembly to ignore the findings of neutral investigations conducted by the Court of Cassation.
