January 25 and the long shadow of unanswered justice

The question of justice surfaced for me while reading Al Manassa’s Gen Z & the Revolution series, authored by a group of gifted young people. It ran through the text like a quiet undertow, intersecting with references to a stunted political imagination, the urgent task of rebuilding collective memory, and a long-settled sense of injustice rooted in the absence of accountability.

I was roughly the writers’ age when I took part in the revolution. My days were split: half in the square, half racing between the State Council and the High Court covering hearings and complaints. There, I witnessed the first attempt to “legalize” popular demands—channeling anger into a legal container—as Mubarak formed a committee of senior judges to draft constitutional amendments.

Two days before Mubarak fell, amid rising doubts about the regime’s survival, I pressed a committee member at the High Court. When I asked if they had considered special political trials for those responsible, he looked offended. “The law must take its course,” he replied, “and the prosecutor general will exercise his powers.”

Justice has many faces

Justice in the context of the January Revolution—pursuit, accountability, and reckoning—has always been a sensitive and contested matter, across its three familiar tracks: criminal responsibility, financial corruption, and administrative violations.

In moments of violent rupture pure justice often turns into an abstraction. It bends under unequal power, repurposed by emerging authorities to stabilize new realities and assert control. This tension has haunted every attempt to seriously conceptualize justice following Mubarak’s removal.

It was never enough to demand retribution for the revolution’s martyrs and wounded, or to purge minor functionaries and regime fixers. The uprising was the culmination of three decades of accumulated injustice, compressed in its final six years by policies of impoverishment, systemic corruption, the engineering of hereditary rule, the concentration of wealth and power, and a widening class divide—each strand containing countless prosecutable offenses. Yet this understanding, however clear, was never translated into an effective political or legal framework.

Some still resist reopening the justice file, convinced that doing so would amount to an attack on the judiciary itself and on the outcomes of its work—investigations, indictments, rulings, legal opinions, and official statements.

Justice, however, is far broader than what passes through courtrooms; it is inseparable from the political struggle. It was shaped by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) constitutional declarations and executive control, as well as its volatile relationships with revolutionary forces, Mubarak-era remnants, and an expanding web of vested interests.

Others, meanwhile, rushed to blame the courts alone for the return of Mubarak-era figures to public life, ignoring this wider context. They forget that the trajectory of January justice was jointly fashioned by the military council and a mix of traditional and youth political groups, with enthusiastic support from segments of the legal profession and the media.

A conventional framework, meager results

From the outset, this path was deeply flawed: narrow in scope, rigid in its reliance on conventional legal frameworks, and driven by a frantic pursuit of swift, resounding verdicts—regardless of the strength of the charges or their vulnerability on appeal. The aim was applause, reassurance, and the illusion of decisive change. Unsurprisingly, the results never matched the scale of the moment, remaining mired in symbolism and trivia.

Within this conventional judicial framework—and amid the rapid political reversals between 2011 and 2014—the justice track of January quietly mutated into a mechanism for rehabilitating Mubarak-era figures and easing them back into public life. Some returned through serial acquittals; others benefited from reconciliation provisions introduced by legislative amendments that closed illicit-gains cases. The state later extended this logic to entirely different domains, from illegal construction to electricity theft.

Impunity was not the only outcome. The January justice process also furnished the raw material for false narratives. Enemies of the revolution feasted on accusations of treason and clumsily stitched tales of foreign conspiracies, until ideas once dismissed with ridicule resurfaced — some of them now dressed up as sober, mature intellectual “revisions.”

A revolution, by judicial ruling

These hollow outcomes sit uneasily beside beginnings that once looked genuinely promising.

Between late February and mid-April 2011, as protesters still occupied Tahrir and Abbasiya squares, Prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud ordered the freezing of assets belonging to Mubarak, his family, and several senior regime figures. Mubarak himself was detained on charges of killing protesters, his interior minister, Habib El-Adly, was sent to trial, and the Illicit Gains Authority launched wide-ranging investigations into National Democratic Party leaders and ministers from Ahmed Nazif’s government.

On April 16, the Higher Administrative Court issued a landmark ruling on the “legal nature” of the events, declaring them a glorious revolution that had toppled the regime. By necessity and by law, this entailed the fall of the instruments through which that regime had exercised power—tools inseparable from it. Chief among them was the ruling National Democratic Party, whose corruption of political, economic, and social life had been established beyond doubt after decades of monopoly under Mubarak.

On June 28, the Administrative Court followed with a ruling dissolving local councils. While the practical effect was significant, the reasoning mattered more. The court held that the success of the people’s revolution had stripped the governing apparatus and its executive extensions of any remaining legitimacy. These bodies, it argued, had served as instruments of policies and ideas that “destroyed and corrupted everything beautiful in the nation” and had failed in their most basic duty to citizens.

As the dispute over “elections first or the constitution first?” intensified, anger in the square and among political forces centered on what was seen as deliberate foot-dragging by the judiciary and the military council in bringing Mubarak to trial. This mood peaked in the mass demonstration of Friday, July 8, under the slogan “The revolution first”—a declaration that revolutionary goals took precedence over both elections and constitutional drafting. Days later, Aug. 3 was set as the opening date for the trial of Mubarak, his two sons, Habib El-Adly and his aides, and Hussein Salem on charges of killing protesters and looting public funds.

A chapter of missed opportunities

As the summer of 2011 wore on, a series of warning signs appeared—signs we failed to read or act upon with sufficient seriousness. Revisiting them now is not an exercise in belated triumphalism, but in sober reckoning.

The first sign emerged from the investigations themselves. Managing the central case of killing protesters—the so-called trial of the century—in a way that could deliver genuine justice proved extraordinarily difficult. The evidence was thin and often inconclusive. Causation between the defendants and the killings was weak, the principal perpetrators never appeared in the dock, and no documents were produced to establish intent to kill. 

The second sign appeared in other cases that produced rapid convictions, such as the license plate case involving Nazif, El-Adly, and former finance minister Youssef Boutros Ghali. These cases barely scratched the surface and failed to speak to the deeper grievances that had fueled the revolution. 

A third sign emerged in the jurisprudence of the State Council—both the Administrative Court and the Higher Administrative Court—which linked the revolution as a political event to concrete legal consequences. These rulings cited executive violations that were a matter of public record, including the disregard for judgments annulling the 2010 parliamentary elections and questionable public-sector privatization deals. Yet despite their potential, the rulings drifted without a political force capable of turning them into a coherent justice project.

The fourth and final sign came from SCAF itself. It was visibly unsettled, prone to contradiction and reactive improvisation—a vulnerability that could have been exploited through sustained pressure. This was evident in the repeated and conflicting amendments to election laws, which ultimately laid the groundwork for dissolving parliament, and in the rushed, ineffective revival of the 1952 law on political treachery under the new label of corrupting political life, following a deal with political parties.

The survivors return

Instead of confronting these signals, everyone was pushed into one electoral contest after another. Seriousness drained away.

The law on corrupting political life was never enforced and remained ink on paper. It was followed by the political isolation law, a piece of legislation marked by distortion and punishment without accountability, narrowly designed to block Ahmed Shafiq’s path to the presidency. It was quickly struck down as unconstitutional.

In a calmer and more mature political moment, these signals could have prompted a fundamental shift in how justice was understood—away from the chase for rapid punishment and toward a comprehensive revolutionary framework for accountability. Such a framework would have addressed the political crimes of the Mubarak regime, collectively and individually, through clearer and broader substantive rules, transparent and public procedures, and proportionate sanctions. It could have accommodated independent criminal cases without undermining criminal or disciplinary accountability.

The project of political trials deserved careful design, development, and persistence, regardless of the legal or security objections raised against it, before the transition from revolutionary legitimacy to constitutional legitimacy—especially as counterrevolutionary forces coordinated their efforts.

The aim was never simply to impose material or moral punishment on violators of the constitution and betrayers of political trust, in the words of the late jurist Mohamed Amin El-Mahdi. It was also to write history honestly: to unearth buried truths, dismantle corruption networks, and lay the foundations for something better. This, ultimately, is where the revolution fell short.