RECOMMENDATIONS BY A COALITION OF INDEPENDENT EGYPTIAN HUMAN RIGHTS (NGOS) FOR THE UN UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW (UPR) OF EGYPT

I. Civil and political rights
A. Constitutional reform
Egypt needs a new constitution, or at least a fundamental reform of the 1971 constitution, which constitutes the primary source of the chronic institutional and structural illnesses that plague human rights observance in Egypt, largely because it gives the executive authority absolute power over the legislature and judiciary and grants the president of the republic unlimited authority subject to no oversight or external review.
Although when issued the 1971 constitution was better than the constitutions imposed on Egypt since the July 1952 revolution, subsequent amendments introduced in 1980 and in 2007 have made it the worst post-revolution constitution. It is difficult to imagine engaging in any constitutional reform without revising a large number of the document’s articles and fundamentally altering its guiding philosophy and structure, which is beyond the scope of these recommendations.