BBC news with Jerry Smit.

Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court has

overruled

president Mohammed Mursi's decision to reconvene parliament. Parliaments have met on Tuesday

in defiance of

the country's military council which ordered the dissolution after an earlier ruling by the court. Jon Leyne reports.

This decision by the constitutional court was expected by many experts. The court had already ruled that parliamentary elections were unconstitutional, a ruling that started the crisis and led the military council to dissolve parliament. What the lawyers will still have to decide is what happens next. According to some commentators, just by meeting today parliament may have transferred its powers from military to the president. So it will become a complicated legal wrangle that could go on for months or years.

Lawyers for the widow of Yasser Arafat say she will file a legal complain in France asking authorities to investigate his death after a television

documentary

alleged that he was poisoned.

Palestinian authorities gave final approval on Monday for late Palestinian leader's body to be

exhumed

and asked for an international inquiry into his death in a French military hospital in 2004. Last week, the Qatar based television station Al Jazeera suggested that Mr. Arafat may have been poisoned in polonium-a radioactive element.

The British government has delayed plans to reform the upper chamber of parliament-the House of Lords, just hours before a key vote. Dozens of MPs from the main coalition party-the Conservatives have threatened to join the opposition Labor party in voting to block the legislation. The reform is a key policy for the Conservatives junior partners the Liberal Democrats. The foreign secretary William Hague says the government will pressure ahead with these plans.