CAIRO (Islam Online) -Parliament's decision to extend Egypt's 30-year-old state of emergency for a further three years met outrage from the country's human rights activists, Islamists and opposition.
The non-governmental Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) said it was "extremely disturbed" by the renewal of the emergency laws, which were imposed in 1967 and lifted for only 18 months at the beginning of the 1980s.
The state of emergency had been accompanied by "screaming violations of human rights in Egypt," the group said in a statement urging President Hosni Mubarak to overrule the parliament's decision.
Under the laws, the authorities can detain anyone deemed threatening to state security for renewable 45-day periods without going to the courts. The laws also give military courts the power to try civilians.
They have been renewed every three years since they were clamped back on the country after Muslims assassinated president Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said it was "surprised" at the "unjustifiable" decision, recalling that violent acts by Islamic fundamentalists had not occurred for more than two years.
The officially banned group accused the authorities of sending a negative image of Egypt as an unstable place to Arab investors and the world.
The opposition Al-Wafd newspaper ran a banner headline slamming the measures as a threat to the electoral process and published a cartoon showing a policeman beating screaming prisoners with a club labelled "emergency law."
President Hosni Mubarak still must promulgate the emergency measures, but under the Egyptian system the likelihood of his not doing so is virtually nil.
The emergency laws will be renewed for three years starting in June 2000, a parliamentary source said.
For years, the opposition has been seeking a suspension of the state of emergency, saying it hands the authorities wide-ranging prerogatives that reduce freedoms in Egypt.
The EOHR's Secretary General Hafez Abu Saada was referred to Egypt's state security court earlier in February under the emergency laws on charges of "accepting payments from foreign countries." Twenty Muslim Brothers are also on trial at a military court under the state of emergency for "spreading the ideas of a banned group" and "endangering security."
