Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (14 page)

But the tide began to turn in April 2005, Amin explained, after the case of the bounced check.

“It was a very ordinary case on a very ordinary day in an Alexandria courtroom,” he began. “It’s almost a funny story. But it reignited something very serious in this country.”

The case centered on a bounced check in the amount of roughly $500 written by one Ayman al Jazzar. The tale—which I subsequently also heard from parties to the case—began rather simply: The judge asked Jazzar’s lawyer if the signature on the bad check was his client’s or a forgery.
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The lawyer asked to see the check. He looked it over. He then handed it to a man behind him.

The lawyer had originally informed the judge that Jazzar would not be in court and that he had a power of attorney to act on his client’s behalf. So the judge, now curious, asked the identity of the man holding the bounced check. It was, of course, Jazzar, who proceeded to admit that the signature was indeed his—effectively acknowledging his guilt.

The court session then erupted into an angry free-for-all: The lawyer loudly insisted that the statement was inadmissible, charging that the judge didn’t know the law and was too young to be in the court in the first place. The furious judge countered that the defendant was in court and had willingly volunteered the information.

“Shut up,” the lawyer shouted at the judge. And the judge replied to the lawyer, “No, you shut up.” Others in the courtroom joined in the shouting. The judge then cited the lawyer for contempt.

I heard plenty of other juicy details of the raucous court session—some of them involving assaults on the judge rather than just insults—although accounts varied too widely to settle on one version. But the bottom line, on which all agreed, is that the case of the bounced check quickly became a cause célèbre for both sides.

Like a hero, the lawyer was carried on the shoulders of his colleagues from the courthouse onto the streets of Alexandria. The Alexandria lawyers’ union then went on strike, forcing local courts to be temporarily suspended.

The Judges Club in Alexandria rallied its own, calling an emergency session to discuss the flap. It was the latest of several similar confrontations, and the judges wanted to stem the tide, Amin told me.

“This story represents a lot of what is happening in this country in the crisis over authority,” he said.

In the midst of the Judges Club meeting, a senior judge stood up and said the core issue was not really the lawyers’ challenge, but the judges’ general loss of credibility.

“So they started discussing how their standing had sunk so low,” Amin explained, “and they decided on the following: They were discredited when they supervised tainted elections in 2000 and had said nothing. When the government settled its accounts with opponents and political prisoners through the courts, they had not taken a stand. When the government kept emergency law in place for over twenty years, they did nothing to challenge it. And when the government refused to implement the judges’ rulings, they did not follow through.”

“And so they started to look beyond the lawyers to the body that was really insulting the judiciary—which was the government,” Amin added.

The Judges Club in Alexandria ended up calling for broad new legislation to ensure judicial independence—and for a gathering of all 8,000 Egyptian judges to take a joint national stand.
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Their summit convened in Cairo on May 13, 2005, in a massive tent put up on an empty lot across the street from the national Judges Club, a stately structure with chandeliers, marble floors, and imperial columns that was built during the last days of Britain’s colonial presence.

The session was stormy. But Egypt’s judges agreed to issue a direct challenge to Mubarak’s regime. They called for major reforms to foster the rule of law. They demanded full independence from the executive branch. And they voted to put the government on notice that they would no longer provide cover for its behavior—from election fraud to prolonged emergency law.

Egypt’s press dubbed it the Judges’ intifada, or uprising.
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“This was an important turning point,” Amin explained.

To avoid scandals or constitutional crises in the past, judges had usually taken their concerns to the Ministry of Justice. “But now the majority of judges have changed their basic philosophy,” he said. “They have come to the conclusion that they are part of this society—and that they must act rather than defer to other authorities.” In other words, the judges’ summit set the stage for a confrontation with the government.

Judge Hesham Bastawisi, a widely respected member of Egypt’s highest court, was one of its first victims.

I visited Bastawisi at his home in Cairo’s Nasser City, a remote suburb of high-rise concrete apartment buildings, to hear this part of the story. Bastawisi is a slightly balding man with white hair and rimless glasses. He was wearing a gray pinstripe suit, and he smoked nervously. We sat on faux-French settees with embroidered pictures of musicians serenading comely courtesans. A framed verse from the Koran on black velvet hung on the wall next to a bookcase neatly filled with a set of encyclopedias and law books. His daughter, who wore the pink
hejab
now popular in Cairo, sat with us.

The government had just stripped Bastawisi of his judicial immunity and referred him to the government’s chief prosecutor for investigation. The problem went back to Egypt’s troubled parliamentary elections.

After Noha al Zeiny’s bold testimonial, Bastawisi had gone one big step further: He filed formal complaints demanding an investigation into the vote-rigging. He also charged that some of his brethren had been involved in election fraud.
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And then he took the case to the media.

Bastawisi spoke with authority. He was one of fifteen senior judges—selected secretly by his peers at the Judges Club—in charge of receiving complaints from colleagues deployed at polling stations. Egypt’s Ministry of Interior organizes the mechanics of an election, but the judges officially oversee it, basically acting as supervisors on voting day, monitoring the count, and then certifying the results.

Fraud during the election, Bastawisi told me, had been insidious nationwide. “By the end of the election, I had three bags of complaints—big bags, like big grocery bags,” he said, holding out his arms to approximate the size.

“There was one particularly horrifying story about a group of judges who had to escape with the ballot boxes because the police refused to protect them from the thugs,” he said. “They ended up hiding under the stairs to protect the votes.”

Unlike past elections, the Judges Club this time was not keeping quiet—even under threat.

“When we started exposing the problems and saying some judges of ill repute who work closely with the government were involved in fraud, we were dismissed as a minority of renegades and transferred to the prosecutor’s office for investigation,” Bastawisi told me.

He was not alone. When I saw Bastawisi, three of the fifteen on the Judges Club election committee had been stripped of their immunity. Over the next month, the list grew to eight judges. Egyptians began talking about a second “massacre of the judiciary.”

The crackdown was not just to get the judges to withdraw their complaints, Bastawisi explained. It was also to prevent the Judges Club from releasing a final report, after a five-month investigation, which could challenge the election results—particularly in districts where the ruling party had won.

Noha al Zeiny’s revelation about Damanhur had been shocking. But she was only one voice. And while she was a lawyer who worked for the Ministry of Justice, she was not a judge. The Judges Club, on the other hand, had the clout to legally challenge the legitimacy of the entire election process. And unlike past elections when the judges had avoided confrontation, this time they stood firm.

On March 17, 2006, Egypt’s judges assembled again in Cairo to hold an unprecedented public demonstration. Wearing the green or red fringed sashes of their profession draped across their suits, nearly 1,000 judges from across the country packed the street in front of Cairo’s Judges Club to demand change.

“The independence of the judges is the battle of the whole nation, and we all have to defend it,” Judges Club chief Zakaria Abdel Aziz told the crowd.
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The judges then stood in the spring sunshine for almost an hour in silent protest.

Hundreds of prodemocracy demonstrators cheered them on. “Judges, judges, save us from tyranny,” some shouted in unison.
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One older male demonstrator, with a zipper taped over his mouth, held up a red pillow with “I
judges” inscribed on it.
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The judges’ uprising seriously altered the political dynamics in Egypt.

Baheyya, Egypt’s leading blogger and a legal expert herself, opined,

Egypt’s judges, she concluded, had taken on “the public leadership roles usually assumed by politicians.”

I asked Nasser Amin what the judges’ uprising meant for Egypt’s future. “The drama,” he replied, “is just beginning. They hold the legitimacy of Egypt in their hands.”

Before leaving, almost as an afterthought, I asked Amin about the origins of his unusual center.

It had been launched to work with Egypt’s judges. But the center had quickly expanded to broader rule-of-law issues throughout the Arab world. It started drafting bill-of-rights amendments. It investigated torture cases. It provided legal aid to human-rights activists facing prosecution. It consulted on how to make a judicial branch independent. It visited prisons. And it was the only Arab group invited to help monitor Iraq’s first elections. Amin led the delegation.

After the May 25 protest in Cairo, the center also kept track of what happened to victims and eyewitnesses of the attack on the women. It filed a complaint with Egypt’s Attorney General as well as the World Organization Against Torture, citing State Security for continuing to threaten the molested women for weeks after the event.
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“Lazoghly is Egypt’s Bastille, and it has to go,” Amin told the Egyptian press at the time.
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“The center opened in 1997,” Amin told me. “But it was originally the idea of a law student who was in his final year at Cairo University ten years earlier. He was a leftist, a Nasserite, and he took some critical stands against the government.

“Well,” he continued, “one day, he and fifteen of his friends were arrested.”

Amin stopped to light another Marlboro. “They were picked up under emergency law provisions and transferred to the high State Security court. Its rulings are final, and there’s no appeal. They were forced to stand in a cage in the courtroom, where they were charged with plotting to overthrow the government, inciting society, and insulting the constitution.”

Amnesty International mentioned Amin’s trial in its annual report about cases in 1988. The government charges, it noted, also included sabotage and collaboration with Libya.
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“Well,” Amin continued, “State Security tortured them, as well as members of their families, and forced confessions that were not true—including that they had weapons. None of it was true. But based on the charges, the prosecution asked for the death penalty or life imprisonment. The defendants couldn’t believe this was happening to them.”

State Security had also hauled the law student’s brother and father into Lazoghly Square. Both were tortured, Amin said. “They stripped them naked and tortured them in front of each other. They used electric shock, and then forced the brother to beat the father. They were held for several weeks.”

Amnesty International noted that some of the accused produced forensic medical reports in court, which appeared to corroborate allegations of physical and psychological torture while they were held incommunicado before the trial.
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The judge in the case was Said el Ashmawy, one of the real characters in Egypt’s judiciary, I later learned. Ashmawy was occasionally hassled too.

A prolific author, he has written more than thirty books. But five of them were banned by Al Azhar, Egypt’s state-controlled religious university.
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Ashmawy countered by taking the ban to court.