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Egypt’s constitutional morass

Zaid Al-Ali, 23 August 2013, Foreign Policy

Egypt’s Interim President Adli Mansour issued a new constitutional declaration on July 8 following President Mohamed Morsi’s removal from office. This declaration laid out a three-step process for amending Egypt’s constitution. First, a 10-member technical committee would be given one month to propose changes to the 2012 constitution. Following that, a 50-member constituent assembly (which will have only six political party representatives and which shall consist mostly of representatives from state institutions) will have two months to debate the proposed changes. Finally, a referendum will be organized to ratify the new constitution, followed by parliamentary and presidential elections.

Meet the Author

Zaid Al-Ali has been practicing law since 1999, specializing in international commercial arbitration and comparative constitutional law.

Author Zaid Al-Ali and his wife Rouba Beydoun during a dust storm in Iraq in 2010.

He has law degrees from Harvard Law School, the Université de Paris I (Sorbonne), and King’s College London. From 2005 to 2010, he was a legal adviser to the United Nations focusing on constitutional, parliamentary, and judicial reform in Iraq. Since the beginning of 2011, he has been working on constitutional reform throughout the Arab region, in particular in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. He has published widely on Iraq and on constitutional law.

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