Word: parliament
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First, the Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to see anything close to the electoral success it enjoyed during the 2005 parliamentary elections, in which the group, whose members run as independent candidates to get around the ban, swept a stunning 20% of the seats in the lower house of parliament, making it the largest opposition bloc to face off against Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. The regime now seems ready to make sure that doesn't happen again. Three senior leaders among the 16 Brotherhood members arrested earlier this month, including the deputy leader of the group, are, according...
...been arrested on unspecified charges of conspiring against the government. Rajapaksa's administration is often accused of alleged abuses (including extrajudicial killings of Tamils and journalists), but he was easily re-elected on a wave of postwar euphoria. By neutralizing his erstwhile chief of staff, and also dissolving Parliament ahead of legislative polls, he has pressed home his victory decisively. Unable to mount a credible opposition, Rajapaksa's critics will soon find their horizons curtailed. For Fonseka, they have already been reduced to the walls of a cell...
Nonetheless, the move enraged other European lawmakers, who said the Parliament was merely pontificating. "The European Parliament has thrown its toys out of the pram and put a crucial counter-terrorism data-sharing agreement with the U.S.A. into jeopardy," said Timothy Kirkhope, a lawmaker from the British Conservative Party. "It is not fair that the U.S.'s efforts to tackle terrorist financing have become embroiled in an argument between E.U. institutions." European and U.S. officials will almost certainly need to craft a different kind of pact now. While Washington could cut individual deals with the banking centers of Belgium...
...democratic system that allowed the Parliament to have a say on the issue is only two months old. Under the E.U.'s Lisbon Treaty, which came into force in December, Parliament members now decide jointly with European governments on legal affairs. And by blocking the SWIFT agreement, they proved that they were not shy about exercising their new powers. Dutch lawmaker Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, who led the Parliament's attack on the deal, said if the Obama Administration had proposed such a data-sharing arrangement in the U.S., "we all know what the U.S. Congress would...
Perhaps the biggest message from the vote is that European governments will now have to adapt to working with an increasingly emboldened Parliament. Thomas Klau, who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), says that while Parliament members were sincere in their concerns over civil liberties, some were perhaps also a little over-excited to exercise their new authority. "The institutional landscape has changed," he says. "This is an early affirmation of the European Parliament's increased powers and self-confidence in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty. And it now has political ambition...