Inside the quiet revolt at Egypt’s Judges’ Club

The results of the Judges’ Club elections, held last month in the main lobby of the High Judicial Court building in downtown Cairo, carried “suppressed messages of anger” that judges have tried for years, without success, to get through to Egypt’s decision-makers, according to two judicial sources who took part in the vote and spoke to Al Manassa.

Turnout was striking, and the race itself competitive. Counselor Rifaat Gaber won the club presidency by a comfortable 4,111 votes to 2,796 for his rival Counselor Rabie Qassem, who is seen as close to government circles by virtue of his former post as assistant to the minister of justice. Both sources read the result as a rejection of outside guardianship: judges, they said, chose to keep their club out of reach of government influence.

The election, with nominations open for roughly two months beforehand, was held under a caretaker board following the resignation of the club’s last elected president, Counselor Mohamed Abdel Mohsen, in August 2024, after he took a post in Bahrain. The board appointed Counselor Abu Al-Hussein Fathy Qaed to serve out the term, ushering in what the Public Prosecution source called a “period of administrative stagnation,” during which the club’s service to members visibly declined.

“The past period was one of weakness because the president wasn’t elected,” said the source, who asked not to be named. “We felt our voice wasn’t getting through.” That stagnation, the source added, coincided with mounting financial pressure on judges and increasingly difficult working conditions in the field. “The work environment has gotten harder, and at the same time we’re being posted to places that are very remote and genuinely demanding,” he told Al Manassa.

The military academy tips anger into the open

What turned this quiet resentment into open anger, though, was a decision earlier this year to expand the Military Academy’s role in judicial appointments: putting it in charge of applications, interviews and final selection, a role that had belonged to the judiciary’s own bodies. The move infuriated judges and hardened their grievances.

The club’s interim board reacted quickly, calling an emergency meeting over what it described as “a grave matter reverberating through judicial circles.” That meeting produced a call for an extraordinary general assembly on Feb. 6; a call that was withdrawn almost as soon as it was issued, after the board met with the Supreme Judicial Council.

The Public Prosecution source described that moment as pivotal. “The assembly was canceled under pressure. That, probably more than anything, is what deepened the anger. It’s when we became convinced our voice wasn’t getting through the board in its old form. We felt the judiciary’s voice simply didn’t count.”

“Equality,” not “independence”

With the club sidelined, judges started looking elsewhere to press their most urgent economic demand: equal pay for appeals court judges with their counterparts at the Court of Cassation, a gap that has widened to roughly 18,000–19,000 Egyptian pounds a month, according to the second source, who serves as chief justice of a court in Upper Egypt.

That search is what pushed Counselor Mohamed Rifaat Gaber to prominence, the source told Al Manassa, speaking on condition of anonymity because he isn’t authorized to talk to the press. Gaber came to chair a body formed inside the club known as the “Equality Committee,” tasked with pursuing the legal fight for salary parity, a role he took on simply as the panel’s most senior member.

The source rejected reports linking Gaber to the historic judicial independence movement, which rose to prominence under President Hosni Mubarak after confronting the rigging of the 2005 parliamentary elections.

That movement had counted prominent judicial figures among its ranks: former Supreme Judicial Council head Counselor Hossam El-Gheriany, who chaired the constituent assembly behind the 2012 constitution; former Judges’ Club president Counselor Zakaria Abdel Aziz; former Vice President Counselor Mahmoud Mekki and his brother, former Justice Minister Ahmed Mekki; former Justice Minister Ahmed Suleiman; former head of the Central Auditing Organization Counselor Hisham Genena; and former Court of Cassation deputy chief Counselor Mohamed Naguib Derbala.

But the movement’s younger and mid-career members disappeared from the judicial scene after being referred to disciplinary boards over their support for the “Rabaa statement,” which had affirmed the legitimacy of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

“Gaber has nothing to do with the independence movement. He was never affiliated with it,” the second source said, adding that his public role really began only when he took over the Equality Committee. The source was troubled by attempts to draw that link; attempts he’d seen surface in closed judges’ groups on social media, where Qassem supporters mocked the celebrations of Gaber’s win: “Didn’t we already finish off the independence movement and the Brotherhood judges…wipe them out completely? What’s bringing them back now?”

The comparison rankled him for reasons that had nothing to do with the label’s accuracy. He made no secret of his disapproval, calling it an attempt at “political branding” aimed at anyone who raises colleagues’ professional grievances. “The moment someone speaks up about people’s problems these days, they get filed under some label…you’re Brotherhood, you’re independent…as if every judge in the world isn’t supposed to be independent in the first place. That’s not an insult. It’s the norm, everywhere, for a judge to want independence.”

The Public Prosecution source agreed. “It’s become a habit across society, honestly. Say one word and you’re accused of being a Brotherhood member. But the truth is, the judges who were actually accused of that are long gone from the judiciary. Gaber is about as far from that as you can get. The whole point of electing him is that we have legitimate demands and we want them met…nothing more. We just wanted someone to represent us and speak for us.”

What about Rabie Qassem?

The race was originally supposed to be decided on Dec. 19 of last year, nearly six months ahead of when it actually happened, according to the Public Prosecution source, who said the board had earlier opened nominations and called the assembly to vote.

The flexibility that served Qassem well on pay and benefits didn’t help him on the Military Academy question

Several hopefuls filed their candidacy papers at the time, including two of the eventual finalists, Counselors Mohamed Rifaat Gaber and Mohamed Al-Dahabi. Rabie Qassem hadn’t entered the race yet.

“The December vote didn’t happen because the Judicial Affairs Circuit ruled to halt it over procedural errors in how the assembly had been called,” the source explained. Over the six months that followed, the field changed shape with the entry of a new contender who carried the weight of a prominent government post.

“That’s when Rabie Bey Qassem showed up,” the source said. “He’d been assistant minister of justice for court construction, and he started making the case that the state was listening to him and that he could deliver on our demands without a fight.” That pitch, administrative, service-driven, conflict-averse, found real traction at first among judges who preferred to win concessions without a confrontation, the source acknowledged.

Qassem’s candidacy carried weight from the start. “He was already an assistant justice minister up to that point, so you saw the perks that came with it,” the chief justice source said. “Photos of him meeting the finance minister. Word that he’d struck a deal to fix the tax-deduction problem on our salaries. the Campaign promises were built on the idea that the government was doing him favors because he is one of them.”

The Public Prosecution member described Qassem as, in effect, “the government’s candidate,” pointing to moves made well before election day. “He started playing the role before he was even elected, as part of the campaign. There’s a longstanding administrative problem where judges’ promotions lag behind their peers in other judicial bodies, which delays their pay. Qassem announced he’d gotten the Finance Ministry to fix it, and a decision followed letting the Supreme Judicial Council pay bonuses out of its own budget to make up for the delay.”

Qassem, for his part, could point to 13 years leading the Qalyoubia Judges’ Club; years that overlapped with the government post he stepped down from before running for the club presidency. His supporters argue he simply inherited years of accumulated frustration that wasn’t his doing.

Where the flexibility ran out

But the flexibility that served Qassem well on pay and benefits didn’t help him on the Military Academy question. According to the source, Qassem believed the decision itself couldn’t be reversed, but that judges could push back on parts of the training — the drills, standing at attention, the weight requirements — while waiting for the promised Judicial Academy in the City of Justice to eventually take the Military Academy’s place, all without confrontation with the state.

Set against Gaber’s harder line on the issue, Qassem’s calls for patience didn’t land well with much of the judiciary. “Even judges who understood his position as an assistant minister questioned his promises” the source said. “if you could do this, why didn’t you do it before the election?”

The contest wasn’t happening in isolation. It echoed elections in the journalists’ and engineers’ syndicates — bodies that, like the Judges’ Club, exist to represent their members’ interests. In both cases, independent candidates won: Khaled Elbalshy and Mohamed Abdel Ghani, defeating Abdel Mohsen Salama, a member of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, and Hani Dahi, a former transport minister — both closely tied to official circles, both of whom campaigned on their proximity to government as a way to secure benefits. In all three races, the results pointed the same way: a growing appetite among professional bodies to keep their decisions independent of the state.

Decision day

The chief justice source traced the image of Qassem as a government-backed candidate to “administrative mobilization” ahead of the vote, instructions passed down to court and prosecution chiefs to make sure their members showed up. The Public Prosecution member confirmed record turnout, close to 8,000 judges, but denied any “official written instructions” to vote for Qassem. “You could read that into leadership’s push to get people out to vote, but no judicial official can direct anyone that openly.”

If they hadn’t pushed so hard to turn people out, Qassem might have won

That very mobilization, though, is what backfired on Qassem’s service-oriented campaign. Voters read it as an attempt to override their free choice, the Public Prosecution source said. “If anything, it probably fueled the anger more. Some people took it as condescension, as an affront to their dignity. The feeling was: you can’t buy my vote with a few favors.”

The chief justice source made the same point more bluntly: “The mobilization backfired on them completely, and that’s what handed Gaber the win. If they hadn’t pushed so hard to turn people out, Qassem might have won.” What followed, he said, was a “punitive vote,” driven largely by younger judges, while Qassem’s support held mostly among retired counselors and women on the bench.

The Public Prosecution source pushed back on reducing the result to a purely punitive vote, though. “If this had just been about punishing someone, people could have gone for the third candidate instead of Gaber. But the vote for Gaber was a vote of conviction. People chose someone they actually believed in. The real question on the table was which direction we’d take: appeasement, or standing firm on our demands.”

Appeals expected

Qassem’s camp hasn’t conceded. The Public Prosecution source said it plans to file appeals with the Judicial Affairs Circuit on two grounds. The first cites a power outage at the High Judicial Court during vote-counting and ballots found outside the boxes, serious enough that Qassem called in police at midnight to file an incident report at the count, laying the groundwork for his appeal. The second alleges a technical breach of the club’s bylaws: that counting began with the presidency seat, skipping the usual practice of counting membership seats first.

The move worries the chief justice source, who pointed to the same circuit’s earlier decision to annul the previous election over what it called “non-substantive” procedural errors, a concern sharpened by rumors circulating in judges’ social media groups about a possible move to dissolve the newly elected board and install a caretaker administration under the Supreme Judicial Council.

Still, the Public Prosecution member doesn’t think a rerun would change much. “Gaber would sweep it again, Qassem wouldn’t come close to the numbers he got this time,” he said. “There’s no real point to the appeal. People should accept the result and move on.”

Despite the uncertainty ahead, the chief justice source remained resolute about what had been achieved on Friday night. “It doesn’t matter what they do next. We’re certainly not going to stay quiet. What matters is that the message got through. That we still have some fight left in us.”