FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 26, 2005
CONTACT: Cara Santos Pianesi, 202/939-2211, csantos@CarnegieEndowment.org

In a startling development this month, the Egyptian Judges Club decided to boycott their constitutionally mandated role of supervising upcoming elections. Is the Egyptian judiciary on a quest to transform Mubarak’s regime?  In a new Carnegie Endowment Policy Outlook, Arab constitutionalism expert Nathan Brown and Egyptian Judge Hesham Nasr argue that rather than a bold move toward regime change, this is a calibrated confrontation with narrower aims: to secure judicial reform and support electoral reform.  Brown and Nasr predict that the likely outcome of this standoff will be a series of regime concessions that, while limited, may nonetheless have significant long-term effects on opening a closed political system. Egypt’s Judges Step Forward: The Judicial Election Boycott and Egyptian Reform is available exclusively online here.

The judicial boycott has been portrayed as connected with the broader political contest over the upcoming Egyptian presidential elections, but it is actually an outcome of three deeper interrelated struggles over judicial independence, election oversight, and leadership within the judiciary. Egypt’s Judges Step Forward analyzes each of these struggles and gives background on what Brown and Nasr call the “contained confrontation” that led to the May 13 boycott.

Brown and Nasr emphasize that there is still plenty of room for compromise. The judicial reforms pressed by the judges may provoke little enthusiasm in the executive branch, but they do not fundamentally threaten its interests. The judicial demand for full supervision of elections may be more problematic, but it is less threatening than it seems. Full election oversight would extend to far-reaching matters such as media access and campaign finance, and there are few signs that judges, working on a part-time basis, are interested in anything so extensive.

“This ‘revolution’ will be less shattering for the Egyptian political system than many have claimed. But the long-term implications could help open some political space for opposition groups and jar one of the most inert political systems in the region out of its prolonged stasis,” Brown and Nasr write.

Nathan Brown, senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, is the author of four books on Arab politics. Hesham Nasr is an Egyptian judge and former Hubert H. Humphrey fellow.

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