Egypt election committee rejects appeals of 3 candidates to return to race

July 31, 2016

By Talia Ralph

A combo of two recent pictures of Egyptian Salafist presidential candidate Hazem Abu Ismail (L) and Khairat el-Shater (R), the presidential candidate of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood, taken in April 2012 in Cairo and a portrait taken in Jerusalem in January 2005 of former Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. Egypt’s election commission said on April 14, 2012 that the ex-spy chief Suleiman, ultra-conservative Islamist preacher Abu Ismail and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shater were among 10 candidates barred from running for president.
Khaled Desouki

Egypt's election committee has refused the appeals of three top presidential candidates to return to the race, after ousting them and seven others over the weekend, the Associated Press reported.

The candidates — Mubarak-era strongman Omar Suleiman, Muslim Brotherhood chief strategist Khairat el-Shater and lawyer turned hard-line Islamist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail — were three of the 10 candidates disqualified on Saturday night in an announcement from the High Presidential Election Committee, msnbc.com reported.

They were given 48 hours to appeal the decision, which all three candidates did. The committee refused their appeals on Tuesday, according to the AP.

"I am totally confused," Mahmoud Ezz, a mechanical engineer in Cairo, told msnbc.com. "There are some legal issues for Suleiman but why did they eliminate el-Shater? They must state their reasons."

Suleiman was disqualified because he fell just 31 short of the 30,000 notarized statements of endorsement required to enter the race, the New York Times reported; el-Shater because of a previous criminal conviction; and Abu Ismail because his mother held American citizenship briefly before she died, according to the AP.

More from GlobalPost: Egypt’s presidential election loses 3 polarizing figures

A spokesman for el-Shater's campaign said the ban was "very dangerous" and that it gave the impression that "there was no revolution in Egypt," the Guardian reported.

"If Shater is barred permanently then we will support our other candidate Mohamed Morsi in the same manner we would have supported Shater," said Mahmoud Helmy, an MP from the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, according to the Guardian.

The country's turbulent presidential elections are being overseen by a council of generals who took over from Mubarak. They have promised to hand over power after a president is elected at the polls May 23 and 24, the AP reported.

The three disqualified candidates were some of the election's front-runners, and have cleared the way for new favorites: former foreign minister Amr Moussa, moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, and the Brotherhood’s backup candidate Morsi are all seen to be top contenders, according to the AP.

“Our concern is that we want to see a fair and transparent process moving forward and a successful election and handover of power to a civilian government along the time frame that the (military council) has already laid out,” US State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters on Tuesday.