The Judges’ Club elections to replace one third of the Club’s board of directors will be held tomorrow amid heavy speculation that the wave of counter attacks triggered by the government two years ago will not subside. In fact, the general consensus is that the attacks will overtake the Club, whose board is, until today, dominated by the reformist current. Didn’t the government succeed on Nov. 17 to take over the Press Syndicate with the victory of the state-backed candidate, who snagged the chairman’s seat as well as other government loyalists forming a majority on the board of directors, hitherto made up of a motley crew of reformists and opposition figures?The goal of these waves of government counter-attacks is to settle scores with the focal points of the limited political activism that took place in Egypt in 2004-2005, mainly supported by the temporary change in the stance of the US and Europe vis-à-vis Arab regimes prior to the 9/11 attacks.At that time the US and Europe halted their absolute support for autocratic regimes in the region, believing that such dictatorships only served to fuel the threat of terrorism and that supporting democratization initiatives would put an end to such threats.The zero hour for the counter attack by the government was triggered by the Muslim Brotherhood group’s performance during the 2005 legislative elections when they won almost 20 percent of seats in parliament. There was a preconception that these results – which were reached in three phases over two months – would shock the international community. True that the Brotherhood won the ballot box “battle but the ruling regime garnered a strategic victory in its long “war against both reform and the advocates of reform. With the Brotherhood’s election victory, the regime had secured all the necessary conditions to justify and set off its strategic counter attack.The first wave of attacks saw opposition leader and first runner up in the 2005 presidential elections Ayman Nour receive a five-year prison sentence. This was followed by crackdowns on the judiciary, the Kifaya Movement for Change and a debilitating security crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, two human rights organizations were shut down and prison sentences were handed down to the editors-in-chief of five independent and opposition newspapers. And while it implemented these wide-ranging attacks, the government also laid the foundations for the second wave of counter-attacks through constitutional amendments that falsely legitimized an even more brutal phase to come. Hence the state of emergency was transformed into a permanent law and vital constitutional guarantees for personal freedom, human rights and judicial independence were frozen.Now that the foundations have been laid out, a new wave of legislative attacks is underway, targeting civil society in the form of tyrannical amendments to the law governing non-governmental organizations. Another comes in the form of anti-terror legislation, which will, in effect, become an anti-reform law; and a third targets the judiciary with the current contested draft law which gives the executive authority embodied in the Justice Ministry, complete power over it.Observers are divided on whether the pending Judges’ Club elections will be another milestone in the government’s counter attack, or the first real obstacle against the constant wave of aggression that has been taking place against all calls for reform over the past two years.What everyone agrees on, however, is that even if the judges succeed partially in stopping the impending wave, this will do nothing to upset the government’s counter-attacks because both the local and international conditions in place at present support its powerful avalanche.
Bahey Eldin Hassan is the Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS).
