Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt. Mulki al-Sharmani
gender-based inequalities faced by women (Singerman 2005). The resultant reforms from these efforts were the new marriage contract, PSL No. 1 of 2000, PSL No. 10 of 2004, PSL No. 11 of 2004, and PSL No. 4 of 2005. Zulficar had also been a longtime key member of the NCW legislative committee.
The late Zeinab Radwan and Fawzeya Abdel-Sattar were two other prominent professional women who, like Zulficar, made use of their roles in the NCW (and the NDP) to lobby for gender-sensitive legal reforms. Radwan was professor of Islamic philosophy and former dean of the Faculty of Dar al-Ulum, Cairo University, Fayoum branch. She was also the deputy speaker of the parliament from 2005 to 2010, and served on the NCW executive and legislative committees. Radwan pursued her advocacy work both through her role as a member of the NDP Women’s Committee and her role as a scholar with expert knowledge in Islamic religious sciences. Radwan, in fact, played a key role in the NDP proposal for a comprehensive, gender-sensitive family law, which I will elaborate on in chapter 5.
Abdel-Sattar, professor of criminal law at Cairo University, directed the legislative committee in parliament from 1990 to 1995.6 She chaired the NCW legislative committee from 2000 to 2001. Like Radwan and Zulficar, she was also part of the coalition that lobbied for PSL No. 1 of 2000. Abdel-Sattar, furthermore, published a book titled al-Mar’a fi-l-tashri‘at al-masriya (The Woman in Egyptian Legislation), as part of an NCW initiative to advocate for legal reforms to address gender-based inequalities. The book examines women’s legal rights in different domains and highlights the existing gaps hindering gender equality (Abdel-Sattar 2000). Abdel-Sattar devotes a chapter in the book to the gender-based shortcomings in personal status laws and points out the connections among gender inequalities in different legal domains. Three updated editions of the book were published by the NCW, the latest being in 2005. In the third edition, the author also added explanations and comments on the new laws that were passed, including PSL No. 10.
In lobbying for the new laws that were introduced in the period from 2000 to 2005, Zulficar and her colleagues adopted a two-pronged reform strategy. One prong was to employ procedural reforms as a pathway to gradually and strategically addressing gender inequality and expanding women’s rights. The second prong was to pursue gender reforms through close work with relevant state institutions. Zulficar was the key figure in this circle of prominent women’s rights advocates who was closely involved in the lobbying for the new family courts. She took note of the idea of specialized, mediation-based family courts in the mid-1990s when she became informed about Takla’s writings and initiative at the Association for the Union of Egyptian Women Lawyers, an association of which she was also a member. During this time, Zulficar was already lobbying for PSL No. 1 through her role as the deputy convener of the legislative committee at the NCW.7 Zulficar believed that since women constituted the largest number of litigants in personal status cases and were often the more disadvantaged in the legal process, they would benefit greatly from the main features of the new courts system, namely: specialized judiciary, alternative mechanisms of dispute resolution, and mechanisms of enforcement of court judgments.8
The idea of reforming the court system as a necessary step in the pursuit of gender justice was also justified by the recorded experiences of female disputants, which highlighted the many gaps in the system hindering women from obtaining fair and quick resolutions in family disputes. In 1999, for instance, Nefertiti Tosson, a senior counselor at the National Center for Judicial Studies in the Ministry of Justice, undertook a study on women’s access to justice in five personal status courts over a three-month period. The study, which was under the auspices of the Alliance for Arab Women, was part of an initiative to gather evidence-based arguments for the legal reforms that were being proposed at the time. Tosson pointed out to me that before she undertook the study, she read the draft PSL No. 1 which the Ministry of Justice had prepared then in coordination with the NCW.9 Tosson and her team researched the procedural and substantive laws regulating divorce, maintenance, post-divorce compensation alimony (nafaqat al-mut‘a), and obedience awards. The study found numerous gaps that resulted in lengthy and unjust legal processes for female disputants. One of the main recommendations of the study was to establish a specialized and unified legal system that would handle all personal status cases.
In addition to Tosson’s study, an extensive body of international and national literature also found gaps in the previous court system that disadvantaged women. For example, the number of divorce cases that were being filed yearly was staggering. Some of the studies estimated it as half a million divorce cases per year (Hammond 2000; Shah 2000). Other sources estimated that a quarter million women resorted to court every year (Sakr and Hakim 2001; Tadros 2000), resulting in an enormous backlog of five million cases. The number of judges, furthermore, was insufficient. For example, in 1997, fourteen million lawsuits were filed but there were only four thousand judges to preside over all cases (Singerman 2005). These gaps as well as others had their adverse effects on women disputants in particular. For example, whereas a man could divorce his wife unilaterally and without the need for court permission, divorce cases initiated by women sometimes lasted several years during which female disputants’ lives and future plans were put on hold. Furthermore, court orders that obligated husbands to pay spousal and child maintenance were frequently hard to implement because of corrupt and poorly trained law enforcement authorities, as well as the lack of effective sanctions against husbands who failed to comply with court orders.
Thus, Zulficar and other members at the NCW legislative committee set out to work on PSL No. 10. Zulficar played a central role in the NCW committee work on the new family court law. She provided detailed comments and revisions to the draft law PSL No. 10, which the Ministry of Justice had prepared, working closely with other members of the committee such as Judge Mahmoud Ghoneim from the Judiciary Inspection Unit at the Supreme Constitutional Court. Zulficar also served on the joint committee, which was subsequently formed from the Ministry of Justice, the NCW, and the NCCM, to revise the draft law.
Zulficar shared with me a folder containing documents pertaining to her committee work. In the folder, she kept a record of the committee work on PSL No. 1, PSL No. 10, and PSL No. 11. The folder contained, among other things, several versions of the draft law for the new family courts showing its development. The folder also contained written comments and suggestions from the NCW committee members; comments and recommendations from the NCCM; and a report from the NDP. The NDP report argued that the social and economic challenges caused by lengthy court procedures and ineffective mechanisms of enforcement necessitate a series of legal reforms, one of which would be the establishment of a new courts system with alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution. The report also discussed the role that civil society and the ruling party could play in promoting the proposed legal reforms.10 Another document in the folder outlined briefly the NCW plan to work on a new initiative for a comprehensive family law that would address various gender-based inequalities in the existing laws such as unilateral repudiation, judicial divorce, polygamy, wifely obedience, and so on.11 On the whole, the contents of the folder reflected the ways in which the various legal reforms that were being introduced or planned at the time were interconnected. The enclosed documents also reflected the close collaboration between the NCW and the NDP with regard to these various legal reforms.
The agenda driving the government’s advocacy for the new legal reforms, including the new family courts, was driven by multiple interrelated goals. The Egyptian state saw the reform of personal status laws as a means of modernizing the country, enhancing its development, and enabling state governance of the family (and thus of society). The state agenda was also driven by the goal of maintaining the support of international donors and the international community by navigating the country’s commitments toward international conventions pertaining to gender equality such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), while at the same time avoiding the opposition of the religious establishment and conservative sectors in Egyptian society. Scholars of Egyptian family laws such as Ron Shaham (1999) and Nadia