Listen to this segment | entire program

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are demonstrating in the streets today to mark the one year anniversary of the start of the Egyptian Revolution that ended the 3 decade reign of Hosni Mubarak just over two weeks later. In the past 12 months Egyptians have continued to demonstrate for change in massive numbers against what they see as a continuation of oppression by the transitional Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). In anticipation of today’s anniversary, the military council announced yesterday a partial end to emergency law, a tool used for decades by Mubarak to quell popular protest. Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi announced the military would curb use of emergency law except in cases of “thuggery.” Hossan Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told the Guardian there will be no change in practice as historically Mubarak, and now the military, apply the term “thug” broadly. Bahgat said, “We call on the new parliament to reject this decree and insist on nothing less than the full and immediate lifting of the state of emergency and return to normal civilian law.” Meanwhile, on Monday the 508 seat lower house of the People’s Assembly met for the first time following November elections. Elections for the the Shura Council, the upper house of the Assembly, will begin January 29th and last nearly a month. Only 10 women were elected to the lower assembly. Egyptian women have protested alongside men since the revolution began and their presence has been hailed as the dawn of a new era for gender equality in the nation. However they have been relegated to the sidelines in official negotiations and even suffered gender-based violence at the hands of the military in the last year. Last month a female activist was attacked in public by soldiers, stripped and beaten, sparking a massive women-led protest on December 23rd that drew international attention to abuses by the regime. Earlier this month Nobel Prize winner Mohammed El Baradei dealt a further blow to the ruling military council when he withdrew from the upcoming presidential race and declared, “[t]he old regime has not fallen yet.”

GUEST: Noha Radwan, Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, University of California-Davis, Sherif Gaber, live from Cairo, working with the Mosireen Media Collective, was active with the group No Military Trials for Civilians

Visit www.mosireen.org for independent media coverage of the Tahrir Square protests.