Gender Justice and Legal Reform in Egypt. Mulki al-Sharmani
proximity between various family law reforms since Sadat’s era and onward, and the holding of international conferences on women’s issues and rights. PSL No. 44 of 1979 was passed before the July 1980 United Nations World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. PSL No. 100 of 1985 was enacted before the UN Conference on Women in Nairobi that took place in the same year. The new marriage contract proposal was considered by the government after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. And lastly, the latest legal reforms (that is, PSLs No. 1, No. 10, and No. 11) were passed before the United Nations World Conference on Women in 2005 and the 2005 World Summit. The influence of the international community in pushing through these legal reforms is also illustrated by the fact that PSL No. 10 of 2004 was drafted and promulgated in a little over a year and the new family courts began to operate in 2004, even before its central and distinct features could be implemented (separate and adequate premises, specialized judges, adequate training of judges and other court personnel, and so on).
The state discourse that linked the legal empowerment of women to the development of the country and its international standing was also reflected in the fact that the reform of personal status laws constituted a central component of the NCW’s five-year national strategy at that time (2005–2010). One key component in the strategy aimed at improving the implementation of PSLs Nos. 10, 1, and 11. Another component of the strategy aimed at lobbying for a new and comprehensive substantive personal status law that would revisit all aspects of marital and parental rights and obligations. The third component of the strategy focused on creating a societal environment that is conducive to the sound implementation of the new personal status laws through: carrying out awareness-raising campaigns, supporting efforts to appoint female judges in the new family courts and in the State Judiciary Council, and strengthening women’s scope for agency and autonomy by facilitating their acquisition of national identity cards and registering them to vote. The fourth component of the NCW strategy was aimed at eliminating discrimination against women in other state laws such as labor, social welfare, citizenship, and criminal cases. The fifth and last component of the strategy linked the aforementioned goals of the legal empowerment of women to the international arena and its global feminist agenda by aiming at removing the reservations that Egypt placed on CEDAW.
The understanding of the new family courts as part of a state project to modernize its institutions and improve their performance was also reiterated by a senior administrator at the NCW, Isis Mahmoud, who was the general coordinator of all committees at the NCW and the focal point between the council and the parliament. As part of her responsibilities, Mahmoud attended the meetings of the legislative committee at the time. She noted that the NCW first proposed the idea of establishing the new courts to the Shura Council in 1998 as part of the council’s national plan to modernize and develop the legal institutions and accordingly facilitate women’s access to justice (two goals that the council saw as interconnected).12 Subsequently, the Shura Council included the call for the establishment of unified and specialized family courts in its 1998 report that outlined the gaps in personal status laws. Since 2002, the legislative committee at the NCW led the lobbying and advocacy efforts toward the establishment of new family courts. Furthermore, when the new courts began to function in 2004, the NCW established a special committee to monitor its work, led by Amal Ousman, a lawyer and former minister of social affairs and former speaker of parliament.
The new family courts were also a development goal that the government pursued with support from international donors. For example, the training of the judges and the mediators in the court settlement offices was administered by both the Ministry of Justice and the NCCM through a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project called the Family Justice. This five-year project officially started in December 2006 and aimed at supporting the implementation of PSL No. 10 by training and developing the skills of court personnel, raising awareness about the new courts, and collaborating with NGOs to provide preventive support to families and children at risk. In the preparatory stage of the Family Justice Project, Zulficar and Takla conducted a series of one-day workshops for judges and other court personnel, to educate them about the new law. Also, under this project, a series of training workshops was organized by the National Center for Judicial Studies. Counselor Tosson, who had previously undertaken the study on the gaps in the procedural and substantive personal status laws, was assigned the responsibility of planning these training workshops. Tosson and her team organized three-day workshops for the judges, one-week workshops for the court-based settlement specialists and court experts who would be undertaking the mandatory pre-litigation and while-litigation mediation respectively, and one-week workshops for public prosecutors. These training sessions, which targeted courts nationwide, lasted six months.
Another goal underlying the state’s role in legislating the new family courts and other related legal reforms was connected to what Frances Hasso calls the “governmentalizing project.” In her book on family crisis and the state, Hasso argues that the processes of reforming family laws in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have often been part of the state’s “governmentalizing project.” Hasso focuses on Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and specifically on recent new laws tackling different types of legally and socially contested marriages. She explains how “legal rationalization” and reform in family laws became mechanisms by which the state managed the population and the society, through producing particular kinds of norms, relationships, and practices within the family (Hasso 2011: 168). I agree with Hasso, and see illustrations of such a governmentalizing project in the explanatory memorandum for PSL No. 10 as well as in the NDP report on the family courts, both of which were contained in Zulficar’s folder on the NCW legislative committee work. The explanatory memorandum of PSL No. 10 began with a paragraph about how the family was the foundation of society; how the pillars of a healthy family were religion, morality, and patriotism; and how the state had a role to protect “the true character” of the family.13 The NDP report began with emphasizing the obligation of the state to enable women to partake in the development of the country, which necessitated eliminating gender-based legal discrimination against women. The report also stressed the role of the new family courts in ensuring the “stability” of the Egyptian family. Then the report proceeded to outline the gaps in the previous court system that resulted in lengthy litigation periods, inefficient mechanisms to enforce court judgments for spousal and child maintenance, and men’s abuse of the right to unilateral repudiation and polygamy versus women’s difficult access to judicial divorce. The report noted that these legal shortcomings resulted in social and economic problems that were hindering good governance and the development of society—more families became entrenched in adversarial and prolonged legal conflicts, more family households became headed by women and live in abject poverty as husbands abandon their families and take new wives, and more children end up on the streets. The new family courts were presented as an important component of the solution to this problem as they would provide efficient and family-friendly mechanisms for solving family disputes. The report also noted that the NDP had a role to play in raising societal awareness of the significance of personal status issues and in monitoring the work of the new family courts.14
To sum up, one could say that the initiative of the new Egyptian family courts came about as the result of three agendas. One was that of the pioneer of the idea, Takla, who had a vision of establishing a therapeutic, problem-solving, family-friendly justice system based on a global model. The other agenda was that of a coalition of professional women who were pursuing (through a top-down, state-centered advocacy) gender reform in the family domain by lobbying for a series of new personal status laws. And thirdly, there was the agenda of state institutions, driven by the goals of development and governance. While these three agendas may have the shared goal of new family courts, their underlying priorities and understandings regarding the various functions of the new courts system were dissimilar in some significant aspects. The outcome was a written law that fell short of meeting some of the main goals of these different actors. In what follows, I will outline PSL No. 10, describing the main structure and features of the new courts system. I will highlight and reflect on some of the gaps in the written text of the law and how they pose challenges for the various agendas that pushed this legal initiative.