Egyptian lawmakers Saturday voted for the Freedom and Justice Party’s proposal that half the constituent assembly's members be selected from within Parliament and half from outside.
The elected members of both houses of Parliament had convened to discuss the criteria for selecting the 100 members of the assembly that will be tasked with writing a new, post-Mubarak constitution.
Three suggestions had been put to the lawmakers.
Islamist MP Mamdouh Ismail proposed that the assembly should only contain lawmakers, because they were elected by the people. Some Islamist hardliners backed this suggestion.
Parliament's liberal members, however, argued that women, young people and Christians must get a fair share of the positions in the assembly. A suggestion from MP Saad Aboud and backed by secular forces was that the constituent assembly be made up of non-parliamentarians
MP Hussein Ibrahim of the Muslim Brotherhood's FJP, which controls a majority of seats when both houses of Parliament are combined, suggested a compromise — that the assembly's members be elected from both inside and outside the Parliament.
The meeting was the second of the elected members of both houses. Earlier this month, Parliament's two chambers convened for the first time to discuss the initial step for forming the constituent assembly amid deep divisions between Islamists and secularists.
The first meeting tasked a joint committee of People's Assembly and Shura Council members to receive suggestions on the selection criteria and distribute copies for MPs to study.
The makeup of the constituent assembly has been a contentious point, with secular-leaning groups and Christians fearing the Islamist-dominated Parliament may pack it with conservative thinkers. Divisions also surfaced concerning the balance of power between the executive branch and Parliament, the future role of the military, the role of Sharia and the identity of the state.
Under a tight timetable, once the assembly is put together, it has six months to draft the constitution, which will then be put to a referendum within 15 days. Critics say that will make it impossible for the new draft to be subject to an extensive public debate.
The FJP had said previously that it wants 40 members of the constituent assembly to be from Parliament and the remaining 60 to include legal and constitutional experts and members of unions.
But on Saturday the FJP said that it had changed its proposal and that the assembly should be divided equally among lawmakers and legal and constitutional experts and union members.
In the meeting, held at the Cairo International Conference Center in Nasr City, the Parliament’s two chambers discussed all the suggestions submitted by political parties, syndicates, and citizens on the formation of the assembly.
The joint committee had received 296 suggestions out of 353, while the secretariat of the committee drew 57 suggestions out of the first meeting, according to state-owned paper Al-Ahram.
The paper added that the joint committee received nine suggestions that constituent assembly members all be from outside the Parliament, and 39 suggestions to limit the members to parliamentarians. Three hundred and twenty-two suggested including members from both outside and inside the Parliament.
