The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a position paper on the draft law reorganising the Future of Egypt Authority for Sustainable Development. The government submitted the bill to the House of Representatives in early July, only a few days before the end of its annual legislative session. Within the same week, a joint parliamentary committee approved the bill after introducing numerous amendments to its articles in agreement with the government and representatives of FoE, before referring it for discussion in the next plenary session of the House of Representatives.

The government bill entrenches FoE’s continuing encroachment into a wide range of economic sectors, including food security, land and asset management, strategic commodities, real estate investment, and the capital market. This expansion began in recent years and continues to this day. The new element introduced by the bill is that it codifies into law FoE’s various practices across multiple areas, by creating an economic and administrative entity of a special nature that takes control of public assets while managing them according to the private-sector rules.

The proposal places FoE directly under the president of the republic and grants it financial, technical and administrative independence. It also concentrates in its hands the powers of planning, rule-making, licensing, allocation, investment and asset management, oversight and collection. This concentration puts FoE in the position of both regulator and operator at the same time, opening the door to institutional overlap that should have been governed by clearer rules of oversight and transparency. Although the draft law underwent extensive amendments inside the joint parliamentary committee, the governing logic of FoE as an entity with sweeping powers remains intact.

Entitled “A Blank Check for the Future of Egypt”, EIPR analyzes the scope of the new draft law and the exceptional, unprecedented status it creates for an authority whose founding decree and mandate have not been published in the Official Gazette from 2022 to the present. The paper begins by reviewing the emergence of FoE and its steady expansion before the draft law reorganizing it was submitted. It then examines the provisions of the government’s bill and the problems they raise for governance and citizens’ economic and social rights. It then comments on the amendments that the government and FoE agreed to introduce during the two discussion sessions held by the joint parliamentary committee. 

The paper concludes with a list of recommendations and proposed amendments addressed to members of parliament ahead of the plenary debate and the bill’s expected passage. Chief among them are the publication of the Authority’s founding decree; a comprehensive inventory of the land and assets whose ownership has been transferred to it; and guarantees for the public disclosure of contracts, financial statements, feasibility studies, and environmental and social impact assessments.

It also calls for separating regulatory and oversight powers from investment and operational functions, and for safeguarding the rights of stakeholders and affected communities to access information, participate in decision-making, and challenge decisions before the courts.

To read the full position paper click here