There's a lot of criticism in Egypt about the text of the constitution. It was very weak in this regard. My own feeling is that the constitution actually does a better job than its critics allege. The real problem, as I alluded to before, I think has to do with political context.
The constitution was produced by an assembly that had an Islamist majority. At the very end, when they were convinced they could not reach any kind of agreement with the non-Islamists, they simply rammed through a document. The last phases of the process were not pretty. Really, it involved staying up all night in the constitutional assembly and going through it clause by clause, ramming them through, and then presenting it to voters in a lightning referendum.
The result is a document.... I mean, there are all sorts of little glitches in the document that come when you finish it that quickly, but the result also is a document that doesn't have a lot of legitimacy. When you take a look at the political opposition, for instance, it's not even clear that they accept these as the fundamental rules of the game or that the fundamental issues of Egyptian political life and of the Egyptian political reconstruction process have been resolved. That creates a very difficult situation.
Again, Egypt has a very strong state apparatus, and those state institutions—the judiciary, the military—are still basically intact. I think we're only at the beginning of the process to see whether those can be called upon to give some meaning to these constitutional guarantees.
Because my testimony so far has perhaps emphasized those parts where the glass is half empty, let me emphasize a development here that I think perhaps suggests it may be half full. When the upper house of the Parliament, which is the only half that remains and has interim legislative authority in the absence of the lower house, passed an election law for the lower house of the Parliament, it was struck down by the constitutional court. It was struck down by the constitutional court, which was required to engage in prior review. The upper house of the assembly then passed a revised version of the law to meet the constitutional court's objection and did not send it back to the constitutional court for a review, so an administrative court suspended, essentially, the operation of the election law until the constitutional court had an opportunity to review it.
This suggests that those institutions, the administrative courts and the constitutional courts, still have some vitality in them. How they are going to operate, we just don't know. The constitutional court is a long-standing body, but its composition was changed as a result of the constitution. There are other institutions in the country that are still trying to adjust themselves to a post-Mubarak environment.
The structures are still there. The question is whether they'll be able to play the role that you're talking about and whether the political opposition will begin to accommodate itself to the constitution, seeing that, in a sense, it's not simply the tool of the Islamists.