Legal precedents

The Judges' Club has emerged as the most credible embodiment of the democratisation movement's aspirations, writes Hassan Nafaa*

---

While there is nothing new about the state of tension that prevails in Egypt it does sometimes seem that the domestic situation has become so charged that it may be reaching breaking point. Certainly that was the impression gleaned from the scenes of Downtown Cairo broadcast last Thursday on satellite news stations. The area around the Supreme Court had been turned into a military zone as central security forces violently lashed out against demonstrators who had assembled in support of those judges who were facing disciplinary measures for having exposed electoral fraud, and against journalists covering the event. The scenes might well have been coming from occupied Palestine rather than the capital of Egypt.

So what's new? Hasn't police violence against political activists participating in demonstrations and journalists covering them become so frequent that we regard such phenomena as part of daily life in the city?

True, but there was something qualitatively different about what happened last Thursday, both with respect to what triggered the events and how the government responded.

The people gathered around the Supreme Court building were not the usual bunch of political activists rallying around the banner of Kifaya (Enough). They were representatives of a broad spectrum of public opinion, angry because a group of judges are being persecuted for having the guts to expose incidents of fraud during the autumn parliamentary elections. Nor were the demonstrators before the court building alone. On university campuses and in professional syndicates protesters rallied in support of the honest judges and were only prevented from taking to the streets by a massive security deployment.

The police response was systematic and deliberate, the choreographed violence intended to degrade and humiliate the demonstrators. Nothing could have made it more clear that the authorities' only response to their increasing numbers of opponents is greater repression.

But why has the Judges' Club become the focal point of political tensions in Egypt?

To answer this question we must retrace recent political history. The current state of political tension is the product of the slow revival of political life stimulated and shaped by developments revolving around the question of democratisation. Several years ago the regime accepted, in principle, the idea of judicial supervision of elections and the holding of the poll in stages so as to ensure there would be enough judges to monitor the vote. The government did so in the hope it could circumvent some of the pressures for reform and then nip them in the bud. While simulating good intent, its aim was to get the judiciary to play false witness to rigged elections. The parliamentary elections of 2000 were the first to be held under full judicial supervision; the experience offered judges, now responsible before the people for guaranteeing the fairness of elections, a wealth of insights into how to plug the gaps through which the administration's fingers sneak to fix the polls.

Encouraged by the new impetus towards democratisation the judges began to focus their efforts on two fundamental demands. They sought to place the entire electoral process, from voter registration to the final declaration of results, under full judicial supervision. They insisted, moreover, that this supervision extend to control over the security forces charged with keeping order around the polling stations. They also demanded a new law guaranteeing full judicial autonomy.

The government was far from pleased with these developments and as judges pressed their demands via the Judges' Club the government began to put pressure on the club's board of directors. One of its tactics was to accuse the board of attempting to politicise the judiciary in favour of specific organisations. The accusation has no basis in fact; there is no evidence of any organisational link between the judges and members of other professional organisations.

The fact is judges were as caught up in the sweep towards political reform as other social and political group. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence in civil society -- of which the judges are a part -- and in demands for more substantial and faster-paced political reform, especially since Kifaya took to the streets to call for the abolition of the emergency law and protest hereditary succession to the presidency. And in some ways the judges received a degree of official encouragement. The regime had, after all, responded at least outwardly to some of civil society's demands, especially following President Mubarak's calls for the amendment of Article 76 of the Constitution.

Against this backdrop, and the government's confused response, it was unlikely that the Judges' Club would willingly become the government's puppet in duping the public and absorbing its anger. Nor was it odd that some prominent and courageous members of the judiciary would come out and speak to the press about the tampering they witnessed during the last parliamentary elections and announce that the Judges' Club was mounting an inquiry into such breaches. Again, the government charged that the Judges' Club was working on behalf of an officially-banned organisation, to which the judges rejoined that the government was covering up for persons accused of electoral fraud. As such exchanges grew in intensity it was only natural that the Judges' Club would side with growing grassroots demands for democracy and against a regime that appears increasingly determined to perpetuate corruption and despotism.

Several factors have propelled the Judges' Club to the forefront of this national movement. The first is the tenacity with which the club's current board of directors, the sole legitimate representatives of members of the judiciary, is pressing its demands for judicial autonomy on the grounds that only autonomy can guarantee the dignity of the law. The second is the massive support the board has won for its courageous positions from the judiciary itself, amply demonstrated in the extraordinary and regular general assembly meetings recently held in Cairo and Alexandria. There is growing solidarity between the judges and their elected board, especially in the wake of the brutal actions taken by the government against several leaders of the judges' movement. These factors have combined to propel the Judges' Club to the forefront of the growing campaign to establish government by rule of law. It is little wonder, therefore, that other factions involved in the movement for change should have been keen to demonstrate their solidarity with the wrongfully accused judges in what turned out to be a poignant and highly- significant spectacle.

Attempts to portray what transpired as the result of internal differences within the judiciary, in which the government has no hand, are futile. The Egyptian people know full well that the regime is wary of the potential consequences of the "judges' Intifada" and is doing everything in its power to create a breach in the judges' ranks by using those members of the judiciary who lent themselves to incidents of electoral fraud. Because the identities of these colluders are known, both to their colleagues in the judiciary and to political activists, they are unlikely to have the final say in this epic. The various groups advocating change realise more than ever that the Judges' Club must serve as their rallying point, all the more so now the official political parties have collapsed. I have no doubt that the leaders of the judges' Intifada have no desire to become political leaders or popular heroes. Nevertheless, I would also wager that broad segments of the public have come to perceive them as the individuals most qualified to lead the drive towards democracy at this sensitive stage.

Is it going too far to suggest that the role the Judges Club is playing today has much in common with that played by the Officers' Club on the eve of the 1952 Revolution? I don't think so. The similarities are too obvious to miss. In both cases neither organisation had planned, or even desired, to engage directly in politics. Two different sets of circumstances combined at two completely different junctures in Egyptian history to transform each of these associations into rallying points for a national rebellion against a system of government that had grown flaccid and out of date, turning them into reliable mouthpieces of the people's aspirations. Just as the army, especially after the Cairo fire of 1952, became the fulcrum of the forces seeking to change the pre- revolutionary regime, so has civil society, especially after the hereditary succession scenario was exposed and the Kifaya movement took off, become the fulcrum for forces seeking to change the conditions in the country today and the regime that embodies them. And just as the Officers' Club was elevated to the focal point of the struggle between forces pressing for change and those determined to preserve the status quo at a time when the military seemed to be the only available instrument for overturning the ancien regime, so the Judges' Club has become the focal point of the struggle between the same forces today, at a time when the law appears to be the only appropriate instrument to realise the desired change.

* The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.