Special Report: Egypt locks up lawyers in Islamist fight | Reuters

See - Special Report: Egypt locks up lawyers in Islamist fight | Reuters


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In all, more than 200 lawyers are behind bars in Egypt for defending the government's Islamist opponents, according to attorneys and human rights groups. They say the number of arrests is far higher than during the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, who imposed an emergency law allowing individuals to be imprisoned for any length of time. Even under Mubarak, lawyers rarely faced jail and were free to defend his fiercest opponents, attorneys say.

A senior Ministry of Justice official confirmed that a large number of lawyers are being held on charges connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said the number is "probably up to 10 times" the number held under Mubarak: "They are locked up in accordance with the law and accusations from the prosecution."

But attorneys and rights activists say Sisi and his government are arresting lawyers to intimidate them into avoiding political cases. Egypt's justice system is meant to be independent of politics, but activists say it is being directed by the government.
"The authorities are attacking the legal profession so that their opponents have no-one to defend them," said veteran lawyer Montasser al-Zayat, who heads a campaign for the release of detained lawyers. Zayat, himself a former jihadist, has been defending Islamists for decades - including those put on military show trials during an insurgency in the 1990s. A burly man with a white beard, he helped mediate a truce in 1997 that ended years of militant violence against the state. He says things now are worse than he has seen them. "I've never been so scared."

In June, lawyers launched a general strike after a one of them was assaulted by a police officer inside a police station in the town of Damietta. The lawyer was pressing the police to move his client's case along, and in the ensuing argument one of the police hit him with his shoe - a particularly insulting act in the Arab world. Sisi apologized "to every Egyptian citizen" for the incident and urged the police and other government bodies to be aware that "they are dealing with humans."

The government says it is not systematically cracking down on lawyers. Ayman Hilmy, a spokesman at Egypt's Interior Ministry, said, "There is no crisis or problem between the police and the lawyers. All sides work according to the law." He said the Interior Minister has repeatedly said the police respect the judiciary and lawyers and that police brutality will be punished through the courts.

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