Forum Radicali.it

CAIRO (AFP) - Egyptian-American sociologist and human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim said he is planning to stand in the process to elect Egypt's next president that kicks off in May.

"I want to stand in the presidential election and I will launch a campaign to obtain a constitutional ammendment so that myself and other candidates are able to stand."

Egypt chooses its president in a two-stage process: first the parliament, dominated by the ruling party, will choose a candidate with a two-thirds majority in May and then the name is put to a popular vote in a referendum in September.

The opposition has long called for constitutional reform to allow the president to be chosen from a list of candidates by universal suffrage, as well as a reduction of the presidential mandate.

Ibrahim and two other candidates who have already declared their intention to stand -- feminist Nawal Saadawi and businessman M'Hammed Farid Hassanin -- have launched a petition demanding that the people should choose the president from a list of candidates.

President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites), in power for 23 years, has given no official word on whether he will seek a fifth mandate, but parliament has passed a motion in support of his candidacy.

Ibrahim, 65, is head of the Ibn Khaldun centre for sociological and political studies which regularly invites anti-Islamist intellectuals and reformist thinkers to debate the problems of Egypt and the Arab world.

In 2001 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for "tarnishing the image of Egypt" and "illegally receiving funds from abroad", in a verdict that was to badly strain relations between Cairo and the United States and European Union (news - web sites).

He was eventually acquitted by the court of appeal, but is still the subject of a judicial inquiry initiated by 300 Egyptian lawyers who have demanded the withdrawal of his Egyptian nationality.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20050103/wl_mideast_afp/egyptvotepolitics