Lawyers and Social Movements in Post-Revolution Egypt Notes

Lawyers and Social Movements in Post-Revolution Egypt

Introduction

• Lawyers play a crucial role in understanding law, street movements, and social change.
• They exist in a liminal space between the status quo and social change, and between the law and activist communities.
• Sociolegal scholars debate the impact of lawyers and legal advocacy organizations in social movements, questioning their effectiveness and relationships with their "clients."
• Power differentials exist between lawyers and movements due to unequal resources and the embeddedness of lawyers within elite legal systems.
• Others defend lawyers, highlighting the effectiveness of legal tactics in bringing about social reform and the multiple roles lawyers play beyond courtroom appearances.
• This chapter explores a case study in Egypt that challenges the notion of lawyers as elites, focusing on non-elite lawyers who live as precariously as their clients.
• It examines human rights lawyering and community-based lawyering in Egypt, where lawyers' non-elite status informs their relationships with communities and the role of law in affecting social change.
• In a context of rising authoritarian legalism, lawyers and grassroots movements strategically combine court and street tactics to advance their causes.

Background

• The case study is situated within the context of authoritarian legalism and a precarious legal profession in Egypt.

Authoritarian Legalism

• Post-2011 Egypt experienced significant transformations, including multiple regime changes.
• The ascent of the military to power in 2013 led to a new status quo.
• The judicialization of politics and the growing role of lawyers have become prominent.
• Legality and the rule of law can become forces of legitimacy for a repressive government.
• The law can justify undemocratic regimes and be used as a tool to punish dissent, transforming into a "rule-by-law".
• Rising repression undermines organized movements by restricting critical rights.
• Large nationwide movements that built momentum for the 2011 Revolution were crushed after the 2013 military coup.
• The legalization of politics exposed the interweaving of securitization and legality.
• Military and exceptional courts have expanded, leading to the transformation of military camps and police stations into military courts.
• The elite Egyptian judiciary aided in maintaining the status quo, symbolically de-legitimizing the revolution.
• Authoritarian legalism relied heavily on the judiciary, excluding lawyers and their professional syndicate.

The Precarious Lawyers

• Lawyers in Egypt have experienced transformations, shifting their class locations in society.
• The profession has declined from its elite status to one occupied by low-income professionals.
• At the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers fought for Egypt's independence and promoted modernizing reforms.
• By the second half of the century, lawyers started losing their prominence due to a changing political economy.
• President Nasser’s socialist regime resisted legality and judicial oversights, while Sadat’s economic liberalism shrunk the state’s role in providing employment and welfare to lawyers.
• Economically, being a lawyer is no longer profitable for the majority.
• Politically, lawyers and their professional syndicate have lost their elite place in national politics.
• Law school has become the "dumping ground" for high school graduates who could not get into other fields.
• Lawyers struggle to make a living, often working second shifts and abandoning their practice for better-paying jobs.
• The decline in status has meant that many Egyptian lawyers live in subaltern areas among the urban poor.
• These exclusions have transformed lawyers' relationships to the national elites and the streets, producing a class of underpaid lawyers living precariously.

Egypt’s Lawyers as Street Lawyers

• Egypt's lawyers are referred to as "street lawyers" due to their embeddedness in the streets and their pragmatic politics.
• Their professional politics has transformed into a fragmented politics exercised on the streets in support of various causes.
• Lawyers strategize their interventions to combine both street actions and courtroom actions.

Human Rights Lawyering

• The human rights movement in Egypt is often viewed as a movement of lawyers.
• Lawyers in the human rights movement confront the government in court, demanding reparations and legal reform.
• The Center for Human Rights Legal Aid initiated numerous cases.
• The provision of free legal aid to the poor and marginalized became a hallmark of human rights lawyers.
• The rise of the human rights discourse in Egypt was possible with the presence of authoritarian legalism.
• Litigation continues to be central to the activities of human rights groups, contributing to the dominance of the human rights discourse and the judicialization of politics.
• Khaled Ali and the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights legalized the labor struggle and reframed its demands along legal discourses.
• The organizational structure of human rights NGOs is telling of the centrality of lawyers, with many organizations registered as legal firms to escape restrictive NGO legislations.
• Lawyers at HMLC play a variety of critical non-legal political roles, showcasing their embeddedness and contributions to street movements.
• HMLC lawyers hosted grassroots political youth groups and created the "Front for the Defense of Protestors."
• They also played a major role in documenting injuries, deaths, and disappearances during the uprising.
• HMLC's central position in the uprisings was symbolically alluded to by the fact that journalists and international NGOs frequented its office.
• The raid on HMLC by security forces is telling of the importance of human rights lawyers and how the state viewed them as a source of agitation.

Community Lawyering

• Community lawyers are central to movements for change, particularly community-based mobilizations.
• They act as organic intellectuals, using their skills to maneuver state institutions through legal action.
• Al-Warraq island is an example of a social movement shaped by its community lawyers.
• The residents of Al-Warraq refused legal aid from human rights lawyers and organizations, instead making use of their own community lawyers to organize themselves.
• Al-Warraq’s community lawyers are the instigators of legal action, defenders of families, and targets of state arrest.
• They strategically organized street action around court hearings, creating a choreographed dance between courtroom and street politics.
• The lawyers understand the shortcomings of the law and the degree of politicization needed to push ahead in courtrooms.
• The lawyers share a common life experience with their neighborhood, pushing them to defend their own causes.
• The lawyers cooperate and compete to help the island, working with youth groups and within the island’s organized movement.
• Conflicts can arise between lawyers and their communities, but these conflicts are not characterized by power differentials or resource inequalities.
• Community lawyers often undertake the legal work voluntarily, knowing that their communities are too poor to pay for their services.

Street Lawyers, Grassroot Movements and the Law

• Lawyers have an opportunity to engage with the state, even when public space is restricted.
• Human rights lawyers and community lawyers illustrate different positionality of lawyers within movements.
• The legal profession in Egypt has become more precarious, fragmented, and de-professionalized.
• Lawyer-movement relationships are defined by being part of a movement, embedded within the movements.

Rising Legalism

• There is a rising legalism and judicial discourse in the political field in Egypt due to the growth of criminal cases against dissidents and the repression on the streets.
• The ongoing legalization of repression pulls much of the political energy into the legal framework.

Lawyer's Role

• The relationship between lawyers and street movements has become critical, with accusations that lawyers have demobilized the streets by opening new legal channels of contention.
• Blaming lawyers for legalizing politics fails to understand the dialectic between the legal and the political fields.
• The rise of the security state has moved a lot of contention to court.
• Human rights lawyering can be viewed as a reaction to the state ideology of ruling through authoritarian legalism.
• Movement lawyers resist authoritarian legalism and bring political issues back to the streets.
• Al-Warraq’s lawyers are engaged in organizing public education campaigns, press conferences, and street protests.
• The Front of Defense of Egypt’s Protestors is a network of lawyers working to defend protestors.
• The Front undertakes data collection, communicates with the media, organizes campaigns to collect bail money, and provides networks for families of detainees.
• Lawyers broker the relationship of the detainees with society and the state, mediating people’s relationship to the law, the court system, the media, experts, municipalities, and government.

Conclusion

• Sociolegal scholarship has treated lawyers as an elite professional group external to movements.
• This chapter presented a case study of non-elite lawyers who are part of the grassroots communities.
• It elucidated the unique relationships that lawyers have to the movements they represent, analyzed this relationship within the context of rising authoritarian legalism, and assessed the impacts of lawyers on movements.
• Understanding the law as a site of repression and control is necessary, but not without contention.
• Lawyers, grassroots movements, and ordinary people capitalize on these spaces to fight back and demand their rights.
• States’ articulations of legality are not undisputed, opening spaces for human rights and community lawyers to fight back.
• These legal actors strategically use the law as an avenue that complements their mobilization and movement actions.
• The law is reclaimed for political change, and the street is utilized as a necessary precursor to any drive for change.