A Lawsuit To Abolish And Stop Implementation Of A Decree To Criminalize The Right To Strike
The Egyptian Center for Economic ,Social Rights and The Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression and The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information today filed the lawsuit 29926 /65 jy lawsuits against the military council chief and the prime minister on behalf of Kamal Mohammed Rifai Abu Eita head of the union of real estate taxes, Ahmed alSayed Abdel Maksoud, head of the health sciences union and Talal Hussain Shukr ,vice president of pensioners union, members of the founding committee of the federation of Egyptian trade unions as well as Fatma Ramadan Abou El-Maati member of union labor force workers in Giza (under construction) and Nagy Rashad Abdel Salam member of the Egyptian committee of labor rights protection. The law suit is to challenge and repeal the decree 34/2011 which prohibits the right to strike.
The appeal reads :
“Force does not make justice, aggression against the rights does not guarantee stability and slogans are not enough to build the state of law
Strike is not a luxury that we grant workers whenever we want and deny them whenever we like . Strike is not a labor right pending legal recognition. Strike is a form of spontaneous human resistance that workers practice to lift unfairness, to seek a good life or to defend rights and interests of future generations. The decree alleges that it is issued for the sake of labor freedom, while the other side of freedom is the freedom to stop working without being criminalized, noting that article 195 of labor law 12/2003 considers strike days as an unpaid leave”.
The appeal stated that the decree does not aim public interest and wastes the rights of Egyptian workers for which they struggled for more than thirty years, wastes the international conventions and disrupts the constitutional principles as the decree deals with the strike as a crime, not a right. The appeal was concluded with a request to set the nearest date for hearing session to review the urgent part of the lawsuit which is to stop the implementation of the decree.
