On Thursday, April 5, afternoon, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) held a public lecture entitled “The Constituent Assembly… Citizenship and the Rights of Religious Minorities”, at Al-Shehab Institution, Ezbet Al-Haggana.
The lecture was attended by nearly forty participants, mostly women, who have shown keen interest in the subject and interacted with the lecturer. Most of the participants were housewives, young female employees, and some male and female teachers.
The lecture focused on the importance of the Constitution for regulating the relationship among various state authorities and, hence, the mechanisms of action of the Constituent Assembly and the need to adhere to specific standards in the work of the Assembly. It also reviewed the most prominent issues that have been discussed in the Parliamentary meetings, and to what extent they comply with the accepted standards of forming constituent assembly.
Responding to questions and interventions of the attendees, Mr. Ahmed Abulmagid, lawyer and human rights activist, focused on encouraging male and female participants to necessarily monitor the performance of the Constituent Assembly and form popular committees to monitor the performance of the members of the People’s Assembly so that voters can properly hold them accountable.
The lecture touched upon the method of selecting the Assembly members, and to what extent does this selection represent all brackets of the people so as to achieve the Principle of Citizenship that occupied much time of the meeting and gave rise to numerous discussions, a matter that opened the way for CIHRS Alumni Club’s members to introduce to the attendees their campaign named “Same Origin… Diversified Offspring” which aims at explaining the values of citizenship and acceptance of the other and promoting the values of communication among all the society’s segments, classes and religious or ethnic affiliations.
The campaign, which CIHRS Alumni Club’s youth adopted and worked on its implementation, has taken its first step last summer through a variety of events such as the issuing of a printed bulletin named “Second Class” about minorities in Egypt, organizing the celebration of the World Tolerance day, and the introducing of the campaign through interactions via social networking sites, through a series of public lectures held by CIHRS in various governorates of Egypt, and also through a series of videos and short films explaining the concept of citizenship and fostering the culture of acceptance of the other.
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