Egypt’s judges, out of the wilderness again

The relationship between the Egyptian Judges Club and the political establishment has been marked by caution and tension since the club's founding in 1939. Under regimes that treat the judiciary as an appendage of the state, that tension hardens into open conflict. Judges try to protect their independence and hold off executive encroachment; the executive tries to impose its hegemony and press the judiciary into the service of its own rule. The club has always been the arena where this contest between independence and control plays out.

The three decades after its founding coincided with the rise of modernist political ideas: the rule of law, the separation of powers, human rights. That period was a proving ground, in which both sides tested each other’s limits and staked out the boundaries of their authority.

On Abdel Khaliq Tharwat Street in the heart of Cairo, confrontation after confrontation broke out between judges demanding independence as the guarantee of their impartiality, and an authority determined to bend them to its will. Each round produced its own judicial figures, men who stood up to the executive to assert that independence.

Successes and defeats alternated. Every defeat was followed by a period in the wilderness, in which independent judges were swept from the bench, only to regroup within the Judges Club and renew their demand for judicial independence as the essential guarantee of good governance.

After the defeat of 1967, the clash between political authority and the Judges Club reached its peak, setting off a chain of conflicts whose effects are still felt today, right up to the Judges Club elections held on Friday, June 26, 2026. Across this long arc, independent judges have lived through a recurring cycle of victory, defeat, and exile;  three such wilderness eras over the span of half a century.

The first wilderness: 1969–1975

The first period in the wilderness lasted six years. It began in 1969, when the government launched an unprecedented assault on the Judges Club that culminated in what became known as the “Massacre of the Judiciary”; a purge that forced independent judges into retirement for refusing executive interference in their work and resisting pressure to join the Arab Socialist Union, the country’s only legal political organization at the time. This was the price they paid for demanding judicial independence and keeping the bench out of politics.

A presidential decree dissolved the club’s board and shut it down outright. The pro-independence judges were barred from any club activity and from working within the judicial system at all — forced into retirement, down to the youngest among them, Judge Yahya Al-Rifa’i, who would later play a central role in the judges’ return from the wilderness.

The first return

In 1975, six years after the massacre, President Anwar Sadat reinstated the club and returned the retired judges to the bench. Judge Yahya Al-Rifa‘i was the lone holdout: he refused reinstatement by presidential decree and waited instead for the State Council to rule on his case through judicial means.

The independent judges came back and swept the club elections under a leading figure of the independence movement, Judge Momtaz Nassar, who had headed the club at the time of the massacre and had been one of its most prominent casualties.

Nassar held the presidency until 1980, when he was succeeded by Judge Mohamed Wagdi Abdel Samad, who carried the campaign for judicial independence forward. At a club conference attended by President Sadat himself, Abdel Samad demanded an end to the state of emergency. Facing the president directly, he insisted that judicial independence was not a grant to be given but a right to be claimed and that the judiciary was not a state utility, but an independent branch of government in its own right.

His successor was one of his own protégés, Judge Yahya Al-Rifa'i — widely regarded as the spiritual father of judicial independence — who carried on the fight against executive interference. In 1986 he convened the First Justice Congress, attended by President Hosni Mubarak, where he pressed for the repeal of the emergency law and respect for human rights and freedoms. Mubarak, forewarned that the judges intended to make that demand publicly, had extended the emergency law just one day before the conference opened. The independence movement went on leading the club until 1990 — fifteen years in all.

The second wilderness: 1990–2000

Faced with the resurgence of independent judges under its three most prominent leaders—Momtaz Nassar (1975–1980), Wagdi Abdel Samad (1980–1985), and Yahya Al-Rifa‘i (1985–1990)—the government launched a counteroffensive against the independence movement by pushing government-backed candidates in the 1990 club elections. The government succeeded in removing the independent judges from the club’s presidency and board, leaving it under the leadership of Judge Moqbel Shaker, who, ironically, had been one of the victims of the 1969 Massacre of the Judiciary.

The club remained under government control for a full decade, until 2000. Throughout those years, the authorities relied on intimidation and threats, forbidding judges from even raising the question of their own independence.

The clearest sign of the government's hard line came in 1997, with the arrest of Judge Mohamed Helmy Morad — then nearly eighty years old — over an article in Al-Shaab newspaper in which he had mildly criticized flaws in judicial appointment criteria and called for an end to discrimination within the Public Prosecution. State Security Prosecution interrogated him through the night, despite his frail health — a clear signal of how little room the government was prepared to give judges who spoke of independence.

The second return

Over that same decade of government control under Judge Moqbel Shaker, the wider political and social climate was shifting toward greater openness. Independent judges made their objections known through the rulings they issued in criminal, administrative, and constitutional courts.

As civil society and the media gained ground at the turn of the millennium, Al-Rifa'i's disciples won the 2001 club elections. Led by Judge Zakaria Abdel Aziz, they defeated the government's slate, headed by Moqbel Shaker.

Independent judges led the club again from 2001 to 2009. During those years, the movement pushed for amendments to the Judicial Authority Law that would guarantee financial and administrative independence, and it sharply escalated tensions with the government by tying judicial oversight of the 2005 parliamentary elections to those reforms.

When Judge Mahmoud Mekki and the late Judge Hisham Bastawisy were referred to disciplinary hearings for objecting to government interference, it triggered the landmark judges’ protests of 2007.

Political forces leveraged the crisis in their own battles against the government, inadvertently weakening the board’s standing within the general assembly of judges. The government exploited this division, quickly mobilizing support for its preferred candidate to contest the 2009 elections.

The third wilderness: 2010–2026

The government made the most of the fallout from the 2007 protests. Its candidate, Judge Ahmed El-Zend, swept the 2009 elections along with his entire board, returning the club to state control. Then came the 2011 revolution.

As millions took to the streets, independent judges stepped back into public life. But in 2013, some made a critical misstep, aligning themselves with particular political factions inside the Ministry of Justice — alienating a judicial community that is, by nature, conservative. The government seized on that opening to go after the wider independence movement, escalating its campaign to paralyze judicial oversight of executive power.

From 2014 on, the wilderness deepened, reaching its low point in 2019 with constitutional amendments and legislative changes that stripped the judiciary of its financial and administrative autonomy.

Throughout those years, the Judges Club was headed by leadership  loyal to the government, while new laws handed the executive full control over judicial affairs — from the criteria for appointment to the composition of the supreme judicial councils.

This third period in the wilderness has now run sixteen years, as long as the first two combined. But it appears to be nearing its end: the general assembly has just rallied behind an independent candidate, Judge Mohamed Refaat, defeating his government-backed opponent. The question that remains is the one that has always mattered most: will this vote finally mark the judges’ return from their third period in the wilderness?