On the eve of the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution, “everyone was in the State Council” they say. 2010 became known as the year of the State Council wherein all battles for the rule of law, democracy, anti-corruption and for the independence of the judiciary were fought. Much has been written about the role of the judiciary and particularly that of the State Council in politics. Like all battlefronts, the council has played an instrumental role in the development of the human rights movement in Egypt, and vice-versa. This paper surveys the interrelated / integrated dynamics between the Egyptian judiciary, particularly the State Council, on the one hand and the human rights movement, on the other. The paper starts with the late 1980s when an array of milestone labor cases began to first enshrine principles of international law practically within Egyptian legislative system. The paper will focus on primary materials from the State Council including court decisions and legal opinions, human rights litigation materials, as well sociopolitical accounts of leading human rights advocates and key figures within Egyptian labor movement. While not all encounters have been necessarily progressive, the paper avoids the traditional assessment of the role of State Council towards enacting rights and duties, and rather assesses its development process and its relationship to the human rights movement since the inception of the canonical texts till the outbreak of the revolution. It also analyses legal and social struggles through which the human rights movement was able to open the policy space for the State Council to legislate. The paper explores how, in parallel, the movement allowed the judiciary to act as a major strategic apparatus in developing and fulfilling the state’s duty towards not just respecting, human rights from s negative law perspective, but also, gradually directing the judiciary towards positively protecting, promoting and providing rights. In essence, this constant state of negotiation allowed for the “grey area” to be stretched as particular rights become positive. It also creates a situation in which the council begins to act as law enforcement agent - in place of the prosecutor general- taking a further step towards criminal liability of human rights violators in Egypt with cases with much resonance to January 2011 calls ”‘aish hurreya, ‘adala egtemaeiyah”.

In October 2014, the Specialized Council for Education and Scientific Research was established by the presidency as part of a targeted ‘effort’ to ‘ameliorate’ the state of education. Two months later, the council put forward a series of reform projects-30 in total-including a proposal to introduce fees to Egypt’s public universities. In short, it is a proposal that breaks with a 60 year old tradition of providing free public university education for Egyptian students. Most worrying, is the lack of clarity around whether this proposal will even be put forward to a wider public debate in the up-coming parliament. This minute example serves as an entry to point to discuss more broadly how legislation concerning education is created in Egypt. Most of Egypt’s education policy is designed and implemented in the form of ministerial decrees and is imagined, created and concretized behind closed doors without being subjected to parliamentary oversight or any other form of public debate. Whether we are talking about teacher training regulations, textbook content creation, school fees, school construction, pedagogical directions, funding or any other educational decision, the Egyptian public is almost always left out. Because the state of the Egyptian education system is notoriously dire, it is imperative to understand particularly how its laws and regulations come into being. The project will therefore focus on a number of areas related to the educational process and examine the ways in which they are developed through law. It will position these examinations within a broader historical tradition of law and education. What laws have been issued to regulate teacher training in recent years? What laws regulate the construction of schools? How are textbooks developed? How often are ministerial decrees issued and later revoked? How did legislation concerning education come about in the pre-1954 period? How does this process affect the quality of decisions? The research is based on Egyptian laws and decrees issued throughout the past decades as well as other primary materials obtained from the Ministry of Education.

While the ousting Mohamed Morsi and his Islamist backed government in July 2013 represented itself as an attempt to rescue the ‘civil state’ and co-opt religious-sectarian strife, the last two years witnessed a variety of violations of religious liberties as well as infringing a wide range of personal freedoms in the name of protecting the public religious sensibilities. To explain this anomaly, most observers underscore the effect of the ideological rivalry between the Islamist trends and the entrenched Egyptian bureaucracy. For these opinions, the ongoing official crackdown is meant to sideline the claims of the islamist opposition that ousting Morsi would result in a massive wave of ‘westernisation’ and ‘moral decay’. While these opinions provide an insight into the mind-set of the current ruling elite, it overlooks equally important dimension of the complex scene that is role of the constitutional and legal discourses by which these violations are made possible. Eventually, these violations utilise modern legal vocabulary that guarantees the freedom of religion and expression as well as the other principles of equality before law and non-discrimination. Ignoring such significant facts risks the relegation of the role of the legal elite and its debates to a mere secondary, instrumental position. In this regard, a number of questions still need to be addressed. Most notably, How the Egyptian courts and jurists are utilising them? How they are reconciling these limitations to the other aspects of the Constitution and legal framework that entrench individual rights and the principle of non-discrimination? In response to these questions, the paper argues that the current crackdown is driven by a logic that thwarting the Islamist challenge will not be possible without restricting other models of religiosity that have always been considered subversive to both the rational personhood and the public religious sensibility. It is indeed an attempt to reconstitute a form of hegemonic articulation of state-religion relation that is informed by a liberal imaginary of some sort, which has been facing immanent threat since 2011, rather than representing a deviation from the course of liberalisation. In this paper, I draw on a body of literature different traditions of radical democratic and post-structuralist critique of liberal democracy (Mouff 2000, Norval 2007, Skinner 1998, Tully 2008).

On the 30th of June 2015, President Abdel Fatah El Sisi, addressing the media during the funeral of Chief Prosecutor Hisham Barakat, talked about the need for speedy justice saying “the arms of justice are chained by the law”. This quote, stark in its honesty and seemingly oxymoronic, reflects a growing impatience with "institutions of the law" inside the Egyptian ruling class. It was made during a speech where the president expressed frustration with how appeals delay the implementation of death sentences, and where he repeated several times the words “the law, the law”. Revolution, repression, political representational acts of political contestation that have taken place since 2011 in Egypt, have been couched and debated in legal terms. The everpresence of questions of legality may not be not unique to the Egyptian revolution, but it merits an examination of the role that the institutions of the law have played and continue to play in social and political life since the revolution, particularly at this moment when new rules of authoritarianism are being created. The judiciary in Egypt has always performed an important function in the mediation of power: providing a legal, recognised tool for control and at the same time providing a shade of protection from arbitrary repression and some recourse for some individuals. A cursory look at recent legal developments in Egypt, however, raise the question: are we still in the familiar state of authoritarian legality, or is the Egyptian state increasingly moving into “antijuridical” territory? The question does not have a straightforward answer, for the Egyptian state still relies heavily on courts, but that courts seem to provide less and less protection from arbitrariness. Understanding new dynamics of legal authoritarianism is not only important for scholars but also for lawyers, civil society, and anyone trying to find legal recourse in Egypt. Thus, this article attempts to shed light on the Egyptian state's changing relation with the juridical by examining recent trends in adjudication, the court system's performance in political trials and new sentencing, and by looking at samples of recent legislation. The article will demonstrate how a completely new form of authoritarianism that has a hitherto unfamiliar relation with legality is evolving, and the longterm impact that this may have over the legitimacy of institutions of law in Egypt.