Revolutionary website 'We Are All Khaled Said' launches constitution initiative
Ahram Online, Nada Hussein Rashwan, Saturday 22 Sep 2012
The prominent revolutionary Facebook page will launch a campaign to press members of Egypt's Constituent Assembly to vote on articles with a two-thirds majority, to avoid Islamist domination


Prominent revolution-linked Facebook group We Are All Khaled Said announced it will launch an awareness campaign that calls for a two-thirds majority voting system on articles of Egypt's first post-Mubarak constitution, currently in the final drafting phase.

The group said it will start Sunday a campaign that aims at changing the internal voting system of the 100-member Constituent Assembly to a full two-thirds majority system of at least 67 members, instead of the currently stated majority of 57 members, as a step towards building consensus and preventing domination by any single political current in the drafting of Egypt's highly anticipated constitution.

"After the sacrifices we all made for the revolution, we [Egyptians] deserve a constitution that represents all of us, respects our beliefs, upholds our general and personal freedoms, supports Egypt's cultural pluralism that extends from Sinai to the New Valley, and blocks any attempts at re-establishing a dictatorship, through the separation of powers and activating the role of regulatory bodies," said the group in an announcement made on its Facebook page in the early hours of Saturday.

Egypt’s Constituent Assembly is currently in the final weeks of drafting the country’s new constitution, with as much as 70 per cent of the document already drafted, according to assembly member and newly-appointed Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mohamed Mahsoub. There are also several reports that the referendum on the constitution will take place around October.

The Facebook page of the Khaled Said group, that now has nearly two and a half million subscribers, was launched by Google executive Wael Ghonim a few days after the death of Alexandrian youth Khaled Said from severe beating by a group of policemen in June 2010.

The social media website attracted hundreds of thousands of members and became one of the most popular places for dissent to be expressed by Egyptians on the internet. The page was one of the main sponsors of the call to protest on 25 January 2011, which later turned into a three-week popular uprising that shook and eventually toppled the 30-year autocratic regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt's contentious Constituent Assembly still faces the risk of being dissolved by court order in an ongoing lawsuit on grounds that it was drawn up by the now-dissolved People's Assembly, the lower house of Egypt's parliament.

If the court declares the assembly unconstitutional, it would be the second Constituent Assembly to be declared null and void by a court ruling this year. The first assembly, elected by the Islamist-led parliament, was dissolved when a court deemed it unconstitutional in April, against a backdrop of a weeks-long rift between Islamist and non-Islamist parties with the latter accusing the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties of dominating the assembly when 66 Islamist members were elected to it by the Islamist-majority parliament in March.

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