Responding to public and revolutionary demands, Egypt President Morsi on November 22 issued a Constitutional Declaration to dismiss Mubarak-era public prosecutor and protect the charter-drafting panel elected by the first parliament elected by the Egyptian people’s free will. The Presidential decrees aimed to complement an earlier one issued by the Military Council, in order to protect the path of democratic transformation currently under threat. Dr. Mahmoud Ghozlan, Muslim Brotherhood leader, on November 23 affirmed that President Mohamed Morsi’s decrees are revolutionary – a positive response to popular will. “These decrees protect the original demands of the revolution, since its early days – the dismissal of the Public Prosecutor and real investigations and trials for those who murdered unarmed revolutionaries.”
Regarding the Constituent Assembly (CA) tasked with writing the country’s new national charter, Ghozlan said: “CA achievements in drafting the new constitution are rejected by certain elitist CA members who have never contributed anything significant, and are driven only by private interests.”
Pakinam Al-Sharkawi, Assistant to the President for Political Affairs, affirmed that the President’s latest decrees were appropriately timed to re-correct the path of the revolution which has been facing many challenges and persistent attempts to abort it. During a telephone call to ‘Almasriya’ Egyptian TV channel, Sharkawi said: “When we look at these Presidential decrees, we find that they focus on three important areas, in order to secure the process of democratic transition in Egypt. The first is to establish the principles of justice the general public missed for so long – justice for the Martyrs and those wounded during the Revolution, who lost their rights as a result of poor management of the investigation files.” Sharkawi added that the second area was securing the path to drafting a new consensus constitution in Egypt, giving the Constituent Assembly, entrusted with writing the first post-revolution national charter for Egypt, enough time to achieve the required consensus, to build state institutions under a just constitution. The decrees open the door to reform and cleanse state institutions, and to fight and eradicate corruption, she added.