THE trial of two lawyers, accused of assailing a prosecutor, started in the Egyptian Delta town of Tantaon Wednesday amid mounting anger from their colleagues. Meanwhile, Chairman of the Bar Association Hamdi Khalifa suggested the creation of a body to tackle disputes between lawyers and judges.
As the hearings began, around 5,000 lawyers held a demonstration outside the courtroom calling on the nation’s Prosecutor-General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud to cancel the trial and release the two lawyers whom he referred to an urgent trial on Monday.
"We again ask the Prosecutor-General to reinvestigate the incident. He is the chief of the judiciary. Tackling such disputes is a main part of his role," said Khalifa. Khalifa, who was in Tanta on Wednesday to defend the two lawyers, added that this dispute would “tarnish theimage of judges and lawyers alike”.
"The lawyers propose the establishment of a supreme, independent body to probe these individual incidents," said Khalifa, who was recently elected a member of the Shura Council (the Upper House of the Egyptian Parliament).
Thousands of Egypt’s lawyers stayed away from court buildings across the nation on Tuesday to protest what they call the “harsh treatment” they receive from judges and prosecutors in courtrooms.
Some of the striking lawyers went to the courts but refused to attend hearing sessions, prompting judges in some governorates in the south of Egypt to adjourn the trials.
Lawyers Ehab Sa'ai and Moustafa Fatouh had reportedly assaulted Tanta Prosecutor Basem Abul Roos on Saturday.
They tried to slap him in the face for allegedly maltreating them.
"The prosecutor should also be probed.
He is the one who is mistaken," Khalifa told the court on Wednesday.
Tens of lawyers gathered outside the Bar Association in downtown Cairo on Tuesday to protest this treatment. They chanted slogans and held placards demanding better treatment for the lawyers.
On the other side, Ahmed el-Zind, the head of the Judges' Club, an independent judicial union, said the two lawyers should be given the toughest sentence “due to their disrespect for the judiciary”.
"We will never accept any apology from these lawyers. They should have known how to respect the representative of justice," el-Zind said in a press conference on Tuesday. He added that the strike staged by the lawyers would never affect justice. In Wednesday's session, Judge Napoleon Abul Kheir, who presided over the hearing rejected the presence of any members of the mass media and asked them to head to the Judges' Club if they wanted to get information.
Rising tensions and assaults between lawyers and prosecutors seem to have pointed to the presence of a real problem in the relationship between the nation’s lawyers and its judges and prosecutors.
A few months ago, a group of lawyers attacked some prosecutors in the Nile Delta, triggering anger among judges and prosecutors to the extent that some people called for the presence of special guards to protect those legal officials against what they described as “repeated” attacks from the lawyers.
