Lawyers strike to protest imprisonment of colleagues after quarrel at court

Lawyers across Egypt began a strike on Thursday, boycotting indefinitely attendance at sessions of the criminal court and Public Prosecution investigations.

The Lawyers Syndicate council took the decision to strike on Wednesday to protest two-year prison sentences issued to six lawyers on the backdrop of an altercation they had weeks earlier with staff at a Matrouh court.

The altercation developed into what a source described to Mada Masr at the time as an assault by the court secretary and two other court employees on the two lawyers.

Despite conflicting stories regarding how the fight had broken out, the prosecution ordered the lawyers’ detention before their referral to court, a decision that lawyers say was an unfair response at their colleague’s expense to protect court staff, who were allowed to return to their jobs without facing any consequences.

“The court ruling is a symptom of the deterioration of the relationship between lawyers and other actors in the justice system” another syndicate council member told Mada Masr on condition of anonymity. “This was clear in the prosecution’s decision to unnecessarily detain them in the first place.”

The general strike followed a call to strike from the Matrouh branch of the syndicate, which urged lawyers to suspend work, boycott all the governorates’ courts and their treasuries, lawyer Heiba al-Sanfary, head of the branch’s freedoms committee, told Mada Masr.

The prison sentences, issued by the Matrouh Misdemeanors Court, will be appealed in a session on Sunday.

All lawyers across the country committed to joining Thursday’s strike, said lawyer Mohamed Karkab, syndicate council member and part of the six lawyers’ defense team, while the Matrouh branch issued a brief statement Thursday saying 100 percent of its members had adhered to the strike decision.

“The aim of the strike is to make the appeal session accept defense requests that were ignored by the misdemeanors court. The [requests] would certainly have led to an acquittal,” Karkab said.

“The court refused to check the security camera footage, which would have proved that the lawyers filed a complaint with the Public Prosecution [after the incident], a fact that is inconsistent with the thuggery charge they were convicted for. The footage would also show that one of the lawyers was wounded after being assaulted in the incident,” he explained.

The lawyer added that the court neglected to inspect the scene of the incident, though doing so would disprove the testimony of a court judge who claimed to have witnessed the lawyers assault the court staff from a window that is far from the room where the incident took place.

The syndicate council said it is holding an emergency meeting on Friday with the local branch heads to discuss “the suitable legal avenues to be taken regarding the appeal session,” and to “consider all needed measures to be taken against the lack of impartiality” in the handling of this case, “ in order to preserve the dignity of all lawyers.”

* Writing by Ahmed Bakr