In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Ban on women judges in Egypt’s top administrative court overturned

Chally

I wanted to point you in the direction of this article from the Associated Press:

It took a street protest, government intervention and a Constitutional Court ruling over the past weeks to get women appointed to Egypt’s State Council court for the first time. The final result was a victory, but many women’s rights advocates are dismayed that after decades of struggle it took such a fight, and that such views still run so deep, even among the country’s elite.

Especially given that women have already been judges for years on most Egyptian courts.

This is easily my favourite part:

“They say their decision to ban women from the bench is out of compassion for us, they want to spare women the tiring, difficult work,” columnist Amal Abdel-Hadi wrote in the independent daily, al-Masry al-Youm. “These judges have obviously not worked as a public school teacher, a nurse or a midwife.”

There’s also some history around recent issues in women’s rights in the Egyptian legal system as well as an interview with Tahany el-Gebali, who became the first woman judge in 2003. Go give it a read.

6 thoughts on Ban on women judges in Egypt’s top administrative court overturned

  1. Thanks for posting this! Always good to hear about a victory for women’s rights.

    This is my favorite:

    There was a similar hysterical fear of social collapse in 2000, when Egyptian law changed to allow a woman to file for divorce if she agrees to forfeit her financial rights and repay any dowry. Before, only men were allowed to initiate divorce. The law also took steps toward ensuring payment of child support.

    People said “that it’s going to break too many homes, that women are too emotional to take on such a decision as divorce,” Baghat said. “But once women started to practice this right they proved they were as capable as men of taking on such an important decision, if not more.”

    Hysterical fear of social collapse! I love it!

    And then there’s this, from the beginning about having possible female judges:

    In internet chat rooms, the response from Egyptian men and women was even stronger. Women are too fragile, they’re not up for making life-changing rulings, and menstruation and pregnancy make them unfit to be judges.

    I can’t even make fun of this or mock the lack of logic, because for so long men used that very reasoning to prevent us from voting and owning property.

  2. Well, Egypt is a dictatorship. Though probably the most powerful pressure group opposing the government is also bad news for women: The Muslim Brotherhood. Things would probably be even worse if the they seized power. I thought things were a little more forward thinking in Egypt though, at least compared to other local regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

  3. “They say their decision to ban women from the bench is out of compassion for us, they want to spare women the tiring, difficult work. These judges have obviously not worked as a public school teacher, a nurse or a midwife.”

    I love that argument. Egyptian mothers should break out the “tiring, difficult work” and compassion line the next time there’s a dispute over who’s changing the diapers.

  4. @Holy!

    “Though probably the most powerful pressure group opposing the government is also bad news for women: The Muslim Brotherhood.”

    Oh really? So the most powerful pressure group is not the broad spectrum movement Kefaya? MB isn’t even a pressure group, they’re completely outlawed. They’re tolerated to an extent, but that has a lot to do with their popularity. Their people in government don’t even identify as MB overtly. Any kind of MB takeover would be necessarily mild, since it would be as part of a coalition and Egyptians are not going to tolerate anything resembling one of the Gulf states. They’re also far, far, far more philosophically inclined to democratic principles than say, the Taliban or the House of Saud. Their popular rise to power would be a massive improvement on the current despot. A despot who, for the record, pays service to millenarian tendencies anyway to divert attention from his role.

    This is not a lesser of two evils type of situation. There isn’t even a comparison. It’s popular support for a temperately Islamic democratic government on the one hand, and a nominally secular extreme oligarchy on the other.

  5. Hurray! Especially for Egypt’s tireless women’s rights activists…collapsing society for over a century. Now there’s a slogan.

Comments are currently closed.