Mursi to seek compromise on judiciary

Students from Cairo University demonstrate outside the prime minister’s office in the Egyptian capital yesterday demanding the release of students arrested in previous violent demonstrations.

Agencies/Cairo

Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi and top judges agreed yesterday to seek a compromise to defuse a battle over Islamist attempts to force out thousands of judges that have deeply polarised the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Mursi’s Islamist allies had proposed legislation to purge more than 3,000 judges at a stroke by reducing their mandatory retirement age to 60 from 70 to sweep away senior jurists appointed under autocratic former president Hosni Mubarak.

But after nearly three hours of talks, the president’s office and the Supreme Judicial Council said they had agreed to launch a conference on the future of the justice system that would work out a reform acceptable to both sides.

The deal appeared to be a significant climbdown by the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in the face of fierce resistance to its push for a fast-track law to “cleanse the judiciary”.

A presidential spokesman said in a statement read on state television that Mursi had praised the idea of a justice conference and would start preparatory sessions at the presidency tomorrow.

Mursi would “personally adopt all the conclusions of this conference from project laws to present it to the legislative council”, he said.

Mohamed Mumtaz, president of the Supreme Judicial Council, gave an almost identically worded statement.

A judicial source said discussion of the Islamist draft law that sparked an outcry among judges, lawyers, opposition parties and civil rights groups would be frozen until after the conference and the president would present a new draft.

The Brotherhood accuses many judges of being remnants of the previous regime, who abuse their position to obstruct elections and laws proposed by bodies elected since the uprising that overthrew Mubarak in 2011, and of frustrating efforts to bring corrupt former officials to justice.

The secular, liberal and left-wing opposition, as well as Salafi Islamists, charge that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to monopolise power by purging independent judges to make way for its own men in key courts.

The opposition is also demanding the removal of prosecutor general Talaat Ibrahim, whose appointment by Mursi was ruled illegal by an appeals court. Ibrahim, accused of bias towards the Islamists in his conduct, is appealing against the ruling.

Several thousand judges held a protest rally last week to denounce the planned amendment of the Judicial Authority Law in the upper house of parliament as unconstitutional.

But the floor leader of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Essam El-Arian, said on Friday lawmakers should press ahead with the new law without delay.

The battle over the judiciary has triggered street violence with the Brotherhood holding a mass demonstration on April 19 to demand a “cleansing of the judiciary” that ended in clashes.

lA court yesterday rejected a request by Mubarak to be released from prison during an investigation into corruption charges.

The prosecution had requested that Mubarak be detained for 15 days while the investigation was being carried out.

Mubarak, 84, is currently being held in the hospital at Tora prison in southern Cairo. He has been detained there since December when his health reportedly deteriorated after a fall.

His retrial on charges of involvement in the deaths of protesters in 2011 is scheduled to start on May 11.

No-liquor hotel opens in Egypt tourist spot

Reuters/Cairo

Egyptian tourism managers celebrated the opening of an alcohol-free hotel at the popular beach resort of Hurghada over the weekend, a move they hoped would lure conservative Muslim tourists to a region popular with foreign and local visitors.

Le Roi Hotel is one of the first “dry” hotels to open on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, and comes as liberals voice concerns that Islamists who came to power last year were seeking to limit personal freedoms and impose conservative ideology.

They also worry such hotels could deter foreign tourists, whose numbers dropped sharply after the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Yasser Kamal, the owner of the hotel, played down its political significance.

“The idea of launching a hotel without alcohol is not to adhere to any particular movement but rather to provide a new kind of tourism,” he told the Mena state news agency.

A YouTube video showed hotel managers celebrating the launch by lining up bottles of alcohol on the curb outside the building before pouring out their contents and smashing them.

The hotel, which has 134 rooms and 35 suites, has allocated the top floor and a swimming pool to women only.

Around 14.5mn people visited Egypt in 2010, accounting for 10% of economic activity and earning the country $12.5bn.

But visitors numbers fell to around 9.8mn the following year.