Politician Amr Al-Shobaky will file an official complaint to the general prosecutor accusing lawyer and head of Zamalek FC Mortada Mansour of defamation, his lawyer told Daily News Egypt Saturday.
Al-Shobaky and Mansour are in dispute over a verdict issued by the Cassation Court ordering the replacement of the latter’s son, member of parliament Ahmed Mortada Mansour, with Al-Shobaky in the parliament.
“We are preparing our statement against him for slander against Al-Shobaky and the judiciary,” lawyer Islam El-Sabh said. This comes as Mansour accused Al-Shobaky of obtaining the verdict through forged manners while speaking on a TV show on Al-Mehwer channel on Thursday. Mansour led a similar campaign against Al-Shobaky during the parliamentary elections at the end of 2015.
“Al-Shobaky will never set foot in this parliament,” Mansour defiantly claimed. Although the constitution obliges the parliament to implement the court’s decisions in electoral matters, until now the parliament has not let Al-Shobaky in.
“We were just recently assured by members of the parliament and by the office of the parliament speaker himself that Al-Shobaky will be swearing the oath this month and that the case is settled,” El-Dabh said, using that as a reason to postpone any legal escalation.
But El-Dabh had told Daily News Egypt the same thing back in August, yet no progress was made.
At least 100 politicians issued a second statement Friday demanding that Al-Shobaky be instituted as a member of the parliament through the implementation of a verdict by the Cassation Court, Egypt’s highest judicial authority.
A copy of the statement circulated by local media websites titled “In defence of the Constitution and state of law,” said their call for the parliament to take in Al-Shobaky is for the sake of a bigger issue related to the people’s confidence in their parliament.
A first statement by nearly 50 figures was issued in October. The issue concerns the ruling of the court in favour of Al-Shobaky in July, a case he filed to appeal parliamentary election results. Election results had been announced in favour of rival candidate Ahmed Mortada Mansour.
As so, the final court decision was to revoke the latter’s membership and replace him with Al-Shobaky, whose lawyer had claimed his competitor forged the results.
The support for Al-Shobaky came from different political affiliations. At least 12 MPs were also featured on the list, including Alaa Abdul Moneim, Akmal Kortam, Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat, Khaled Youssef, Diaa Daoud, Ahmed Tantawy, and Haitham El-Hariri.
Among those who signed the statement were former ministers of foreign affairs Amr Moussa and Nabil Fahmy, solidarity Ahmed El-Borei, environment Laila Iskandar, and culture Emad Abu Ghazy.
Moussa was part of the 50-member committee which drafted the Constitution in 2014. In March, he launched the Foundation to Protect the Constitution, which aims to monitor state institutions’ commitment to or violation of constitutional texts.
The foundation’s members belong to a group of Egypt’s elite politicians and senior public figures. They and other members of the 50-member committee also signed the statement on Al-Shobaky, including Abdul Gelil Mostafa, Nevine Ebeid, Azza Al-Ashmawy, Mohamed Aboul Ghar, and Nour Farahat.
Members of the state-funded National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) George Ishaak, Abdul Ghaffar Shukr, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, and Hafez Abu Seada also signed the statement.
Supporters also included some party leaders, such as Farid Zahran of the Egyptian Social Democratic party and Mohamed Samy of Al-Karama party. Members of other parties like Al-Wafd further joined the call.
When the parliament received the court’s verdict, parliamentary speaker Ali Abdul Aal said it would refer it to the parliamentary Legislative Affairs Committee. It took them a week to declare Mansour’s membership annulled.
