that they did not meet the candidacy requirements laid out in Articles 26 and 27 of the Constitutional Declaration issued in March 2011 and in Law No. 73/1956.10 Exactly one month prior to the first round of the presidential election, the SCAF issued Decree-Law 17 to implement a law passed by the newly-elected PA amending Article 3 of Law No. 73/1956 on the Practice of Political Rights. This decree-law, also known as the Political Isolation Law, suspended political rights for any person who served as president, vice president, prime minister, head or secretary general of the dissolved NDP, or as a member of the NDP’s policies bureau or its General Secretariat, in the 10 years before the resignation of President Mubarak.11 Following a challenge filed by presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq, who served as the last prime minister under President Hosni Mubarak, the SPEC referred this law to the SCC in late April 2012 for a ruling on its constitutionality. Pending that ruling, Shafiq was allowed to continue his candidacy. The first round of the presidential election was held on May 23-24, 2012. As expected, no candidate won more than 50 percent of the valid votes, and the two candidates who secured the largest number of valid votes – Ahmed Shafiq (independent candidate) and Mohammed Morsi (Freedom and Justice Party) – ran in the second round run-off election on June 16-17. Two days prior to the start of the second round run-off, the SCC ruled the Political Isolation Law unconstitutional, and Shafiq’s candidacy was allowed to continue. The SCC’s ruling is discussed in greater detail below. The SPEC announced the final results on June 24, declaring Morsi as the newly-elected president with 51.7 percent of the votes compared to Shafiq’s 48.3 percent. Legal Challenges to Elections: Decisions and Implications The SCC’s Judgment on the People’s Assembly Electoral System On June 14, 2012, the SCC announced its ruling on the challenge to the constitutionality of the electoral system used for the PA elections.12 The plaintiff in the case was a candidate for the individual candidate seat in the Third District in the Qalyubia governorate, who was excluded from the run-off election between candidates of the FJP and the El Nour Party. The plaintiff argued that the electoral system for the PA elections “violated the principle of equality guaranteed by Article 7 of the Constitutional Declaration” since it discriminated “between those belonging to political parties, who are 3 million, and independents, who are 50 million, in that they allocated two-thirds of the People’s Assembly seats to political parties, and limited the rights of independents to the remaining one-third, which was also competed upon by political parties.” The SCC found that the decision to allow both independents and political party candidates to compete for the individual candidate seats impacted the closed list proportional seats race, stating: Since political parties were not competing with independents over that other portion, then a rearrangement would have taken place within the party lists, taking into account the priorities within each party. Furthermore, political party members had the choice between two ways to run for the People’s Assembly, the closed party list system and the individual candidacy system. Independents were deprived of one of these ways, and 10 For details on the disqualification of presidential candidates, please see IFES Briefing Paper, Elections in Egypt: May 2324 Presidential Election, Frequently Asked Questions. May 4, 2012. 11 SCAF Decree-Law 17 of 2012, issued on April 23, 2012. 12 The SCC’s judgment was published in the Official Gazette on June 14, 2012. Quotations from the judgment in this Briefing Paper are from an unofficial translation. IFES Page 4 of 18