Protest in Egypt

Nadeen Shaker
Egypt

This summer, I will spend time in Egypt studying the legality of protest within a constitutional and legal/administrative framework.

On November 24, 2013, Egyptian interim president Adly Mansour issued anti-protest law 107/13, which restricted gatherings and protests formed without prior police permission. This draconian law has been in place ever since. As a result, hundreds have been arrested and deemed prisoners of conscience.

Data on arrests in Egypt is not readily available or fully confirmable, but activist groups in Egypt have tallied an estimated population of over 40,000 in Egypt’s prisons since the time of former president Mohammed Morsi’s ouster in June 2013 and the current administration. Though protestors have been detained on various counts, including accusations of inciting political, terrorist, and sectarian strife, they have been detained mainly on charges of protesting. The high turnover of trials has seen some prominent activists tried, acquitted, and re-tried. Two major trials have taken place since the issuing of the anti-protest law, each relegating the fates of activists to prison terms of at least two years and to sentences as high as five years.

Anti-protest legislation is not new to Egypt. The first, under which policemen were given the discretion to judge whether a protest or assembly should be dispersed, dates back to 1914, promulgated under British rule four months into World War I. Then followed the Public Assembly Act No. 14 of 1923, which prevented protest without prior notice. And then came the Egyptian Penal Code, which has provisions on unlawful assembly, too. The latest—Law 107/2013—is a well placed reinforcement, coming right after Egypt’s repeated battles with internal conflicts and insurgencies in 2011.

And how does the Egyptian Constitution address the right to protest? It states that it is granted, “as regulated by the law,” which references the anti-protest law and other legislations. Or not. This is one of many such legal doldrums that lawyers currently challenging the constitutionality of the anti-protest law come up against.

If it is interpreted that the right to gather is granted by the constitution, this creates huge tension between constitutional rights and legal and administrative laws such as the anti-protest law. There is even more tension in the case of military tribunals: the military is granted constitutional rights (such as Article 204, which established military tribunals to adjudicate cases in which civilians lead assaults against “military facilities or camps of the Armed Forces” or directly assault “officers or personnel of the Armed Forces”), yet the tribunals involve a battery of administrative policies that are unconstitutional. The coexistence of such tensions speaks to an inherent legal puzzle within which the anti-protest law is buried.