Egypt locks up lawyers in Islamist fight

As Egypt cracks down on its Islamist dissidents, many of the country’s lawyers are finding themselves on the wrong side of the law as well. Attorney Mohsen al-Bahnasy says so many fellow lawyers have been arrested or charged in recent months that he now spends much of his time defending them in court.

One of the lawyers he represents is accused of distributing leaflets supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group banned by the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. According to Bahnasy, his client, a lawyer, was in a police station with his own clients at the time of the alleged crime. Bahnasy says the lawyer, like others deemed sympathetic to the Brotherhood, has never distributed such leaflets and is the victim of trumped-up charges.

An official in the police station said that the accused lawyer had supported several Brotherhood protests. “It is not logical that we would accuse him of inciting protests” if he had not done so, the official said.

In all, more than 200 lawyers are behind bars in Egypt for defending the government’s Islamist opponents, according to attorneys and human rights groups. They say the number of arrests is far higher than during the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, who imposed an emergency law allowing individuals to be imprisoned for any length of time.

Even under Mubarak, lawyers rarely faced jail and were free to defend his fiercest opponents, attorneys say. A senior ministry of justice official confirmed that a large number of lawyers are being held on charges connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said the number is “probably up to 10 times” the number held under Mubarak: “They are locked up in accordance with the law and accusations from the prosecution.”

But attorneys and rights activists say Mr Sisi and his government are arresting lawyers to intimidate them into avoiding political cases. Egypt’s justice system is meant to be independent of politics, but activists say it is being directed by the government.

“The authorities are attacking the legal profession so that their opponents have no-one to defend them,” said veteran lawyer Montasser al-Zayat, who heads a campaign for the release of detained lawyers. Zayat, himself a former jihadist, has been defending Islamists for decades - including those put on military show trials during an insurgency in the 1990s. A burly man with a white beard, he helped mediate a truce in 1997 that ended years of militant violence against the state. He says things now are worse than he has seen them. “I’ve never been so scared.”

In June, lawyers launched a general strike after a one of them was assaulted by a police officer inside a police station in the town of Damietta. The lawyer was pressing the police to move his client’s case along, and in the ensuing argument one of the police hit him with his shoe - a particularly insulting act in the Arab world. Mr Sisi apologised “to every Egyptian citizen” for the incident and urged the police and other government bodies to be aware that “they are dealing with humans.”

The government says it is not systematically cracking down on lawyers. Ayman Hilmy, a spokesman at Egypt’s interior ministry, said, “There is no crisis or problem between the police and the lawyers. All sides work according to the law.” He said the interior minister has repeatedly said the police respect the judiciary and lawyers and that police brutality will be punished through the courts.

Crackdown

Mr Sisi, a former military chief who became president in 2013, has often said he has to take a tough line to counter the Islamist insurgency that has led to two years of bloody bombings and attacks.

The crackdown began soon after the military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who was elected in 2012. After Morsi fell, Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Brotherhood sympathisers in Cairo protest camps. Thousands of others have been arrested. Human rights groups estimate 40,000 political prisoners are held in Egyptian jails.

Mr Sisi argues that the Brotherhood, which renounced violence years ago, shares the same ideology as Islamic State, the militant group that has seized vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. Islamic State has now spread into Libya and Egypt’s Sinai desert, where separate groups are fighting an insurgency against Egyptian security forces.

Lawyer Sayid Abu Aysh believes he is one of those targeted as part of the government’s campaign to repress Islamists. In August, Abu Aysh arrived at a Cairo courthouse alongside suspected criminals in a truck with small slits for windows. Under a slow-turning fan that struggled to cut the stifling heat, he sat handcuffed to an alleged criminal.

Interior ministry officials say Abu Aysh is guilty of inciting violence and taking part in an arson attack alongside a man he had been defending. Prosecutors say the pair set fire to a Cairo telecommunications shop along with other Islamists. Abu Aysh says he is innocent and complains that he has not been formally charged since his detention in March. Judges keep renewing his 45-day detention and he is held in a cell with 35 others.

At the August hearing, twirling prayer beads through his fingers, Abu Aysh said he had been held for months without being formally charged. The judge extended his detention again. “How can they treat lawyers like this ” he asked a reporter during a break in the hearing. “They turn my cell upside down. They want to demoralise us and they are succeeding. Many lawyers I know say they want to quit the profession. Personally, if I am released, I will only take on criminal cases.”