Around 15,000 judges will oversee the constitutional referendum, Secretary General of the Committee and Official Spokesperson of the Supreme Electoral Committee (SEC) Nasr El-Din Shi’eshe’ said.
This was one of the announcements Shi’eshe’ told private AlHayah television channel, after a meeting by the SEC on Wednesday.
Interim President Adly Mansour announced last month that the referendum on the amended 2012 constitution is going to be held over two days on 14 and 15 January.
Judicial oversight was one of the most contentious points in the 2012 constitutional referendum held on 15 and 22 December 2012 during the rule of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.
At the time, judges who were critical of decisions made by the Morsi administration and feared that these decisions were tampering with judicial independence refused to oversee the referendum. Over 90 percent of members of the Judges’ Club, the de facto representative body of Egypt’s judges, voted to boycott overseeing the referendum.
Morsi’s biggest opposition bloc, the National Salvation Front warned about conducting the referendum without proper supervision and called on the SEC to announce the names and numbers of judges overseeing the referendum and how they are distributed.
Other judicial bodies however did agree to oversee the referendum under Morsi. The Supreme Judiciary Council (SJC) agreed to assign judges and prosecutors to polling stations, so did the Administrative Prosecution and State Litigation Authority.
An official at the Supreme Electoral in 2012 said that judges belonging to all judicial bodies would monitor the second phase of the referendum and said that 6,700 judges were available to oversee the second phase of voting.
