Egypt: the Bench brought to heel
Summary: President Sisi moved quickly to quash protests by judges as he effectively turned the judiciary over to the generals while at the same time further entrenching the military into government ministries, the bureaucracy and the education system.
We thank Hossam el-Hamalawy for today’s newsletter, an edited version of his 3Arabawy Egypt Security Sector Report. Hossam is a journalist and scholar-activist, currently based in Germany. He was involved in the Egyptian labour movement and was one of the organisers of the 2011 revolution. Follow his writings on Substack and X.
What began as an unprecedented backlash inside Egypt’s judiciary ended not with confrontation but with quiet retreat. In late January judges across multiple judicial bodies reacted angrily to presidential directives transferring judicial recruitment and promotion to the Military Academy, a move that strips courts of long-guarded control over appointments and career progression. The decision triggered the largest gathering of judges since 2013 at the Judges Club headquarters on 21 January with threats of escalation and an extraordinary general assembly scheduled for 6 February if negotiations failed.
At stake was not judicial independence in any liberal sense but a corporatist bargain that has long defined the judiciary’s place in the regime. Courts have historically supplied legality and procedural cover in exchange for autonomy over their own ranks. The proposed transfer of vetting, screening and final ranking to a military institution crossed that line, subordinating legal careers to security clearance, physical fitness and ideological discipline.
As judges debated escalation, security agencies moved swiftly to neutralise the crisis in public. In the days preceding the Judges Club’s capitulation, General Intelligence Service (GIS) and Homeland Security intervened through distinct channels. GIS officers focused on narrative control, issuing unified talking points to television channels and newsrooms. Editors were instructed to deny the existence of any new decisions, portray the dispute as a narrow corporatist backlash and emphasise claims that judges were motivated by the exclusion of their sons from appointments.
Homeland Security, by contrast, concentrated on suppression. Officers contacted editors directly, ordering the deletion of already published reports on the 21 January Judges Club meeting and the planned 6 February assembly. Articles were removed from the websites of al-Shorouk and Cairo 24, while some newspapers were instructed to suspend printing until all references to the crisis were excised. The combined effect was message discipline on air and near-total silence in print.
With public pressure neutralised and negotiations shifted behind closed doors, the Judges Club ultimately backed down on 28 January, suspending escalation and accepting the militarisation framework imposed by the executive.
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The Judges Club has backed down from holding an extraordinary general assembly to discuss what it described in an internal statement as a “grave matter” affecting judicial affairs and the independence of the judiciaryThat retreat was underlined two days later by Sisi’s pre-dawn visit to the Military Academy in the New Administrative Capital where he prayed at the mosque with cadets before staging a highly public assertion of the academy’s expanding authority over the state. In remarks to military students and civilian trainees, he openly defended the academy’s role as a central gatekeeper for public institutions, listing the ministries and agencies already sending their staff through its programmes, including irrigation, finance, Awqaf (religious endowments ministry), transport, foreign affairs and teachers before pointedly adding that judges would be joining “in the coming days.” The line landed less as reassurance than as a deliberate rubbing-in of the judiciary’s defeat. Framing the academy as a remedy for what he called institutional stagnation, Sisi argued that standardised, military-led training was necessary to impose discipline, merit and ideological alignment across the bureaucracy.
He went further, saying he was studying the creation of new military institutions that would teach ostensibly civilian disciplines such as political science, economics, medicine and engineering, signalling that the militarisation of recruitment, education and elite formation is intended as a permanent restructuring of the state rather than a temporary intervention.
Administrative Prosecution Appointments Reveal Entrenched Family Networks
More than half of the newly appointed members of the Administrative Prosecution Authority come from judicial, police or military families according to official appointment lists published under a presidential decree signed by Sisi.
The decree, issued on 27 January and published in the Official Gazette, approved the appointment of 379 new members drawn mainly from the 2019 and 2020 law school cohorts, alongside four successful appeals from earlier graduating classes. The appointments were made following approval by the authority’s Supreme Council and a submission by the justice minister.
An analysis of the published lists by the independent platform Matsada2sh found that approximately 55% of appointees have close family ties to judges, senior police officers or military officials. Around 40% of the 2019 intake consisted of children, spouses or close relatives of judges, with the proportion standing at roughly 30% for the 2020 cohort. An additional 15% were linked to police or military families, including graduates of police academies.
The lists include relatives of senior appellate judges, members of parliament, governors and high-ranking security officials, as well as Mariam, the daughter of Sisi’s brother, Ahmad Said Khalil.
Critics say the figures underscore the consolidation of judicial recruitment into a closed social and institutional network, deepening concerns over the absence of merit-based selection and reinforcing perceptions of the judiciary as a hereditary enclave closely aligned with the security establishment.
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