الآليات القانونية لحماية الحريات السياسية في الدول العربية ومظاهر الممارسة

Abstract

Political freedom is a fundamental tool for citizen participation in the conduct of public affairs, where its practice allows citizens to choose his assistants in the governance, control, criticize and evaluate their behavior; In addition to the possibility of running for the people's representative positions in the legislative or executive power. In this sense, this study addressed the issue of protection of political freedoms in the Arab States after referring to the concept of political freedom its types and its guarantees. First, we have studied the international conventions which provided protection of political rights and to what extent the Arab states are committed to the protection prescribed by these conventions. We found that most Arab countries announced their commitment -with some reservations-to the international conventions of human rights whether the conventions on the protection of political freedoms or conventions protecting human rights generally. This resulted in the integration of these conventions into the domestic law of Arab States and the introduction of numerous amendments to its national laws to match their new international obligations. The study also addressed the issue of the protection of political freedoms in the internal laws of the Arab countries, either in the Constitution or the laws concerned with the protection of political freedoms, as well as some other laws. In this regard, we concluded that there are some Arab laws that provided acceptable protection to political freedoms, whereas other laws remained under the level of protection required. On the other hand, we have approached the study of the exercise of political freedoms in the Arab States in relation to the protection offered in its legal texts. In this area, we have discovered the existence of some positive aspects in the exercise of political freedoms, but there are also many negative aspects which make the violation of political freedoms a characteristic of the Arab regimes. The study was launched on the assumption that the restrictions on the exercise of political freedoms were among the reasons that contributed to the outbreak of the Arab Spring revolutions. And we can validate this hypothesis by ensuring that the deprivation of citizens from their political freedom excludes them from participating in the public affairs of their country, and reduce their chances to control the government distribution of national wealth, thus the possibility of uneven distribution. The fact that makes most citizens suffer from unsuitable living, and do not enjoy their economic and social rights in a satisfactory manner, this Leads to the spread of poverty, oppression and deprivation increasingly. In such circumstances public pressure increased and may lead to an explosion of the situation, and that's what really happened in some Arab countries in the second decade of the twenty first century, which some specialists in International Affairs agreed to call it the Arab uprising.