The ruling regime's ongoing aggression on the judiciary and its independence is the outcome of several reasons. Such reasons, or motives, have been pushing the Muslim Brotherhood to stand determined regardless of the inherent risks. These motives have been related to the interaction of certain ideological, political, historical and structural considerations that have rendered the Brotherhood adamant to pursue its unprecedented assault on the judicial institutions. Politically, the judiciary is the last government branch that has not been dominated or “Brotherhoodised” by the Muslim Brotherhood. As an electoral machine, the Brotherhood has succeeded in putting its hold on the executive while it has been on its way — through a variety of tools — to dominating the legislature. In other words, of the three government branches only the judiciary has avoided the hegemony of the ruling regime. In contrast to the other institutions of state, the judiciary does not have elections like the other two branches and accordingly its once and for all transformation would allow the Brotherhood to have a permanent stronghold inside the system of government that wouldn't be subject to potential changes in electoral votes that could impact the composition of the executive as well as legislative powers. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the judges in Egypt have been historically ardent supporters of liberal-secular values and traditions. This is in direct contradiction with the ruling regime's political orientation of raising the banner of Islamic reference. Moreover, the Brotherhood's domination of the judiciary would be conducive to many other long and short-term objectives. Reorganisation of judicial institutions through changing the age of retirement would allow the Brotherhood to staff vacant positions within such institutions with its loyal members or sympathisers. Such staffing of judicial institutions would allow the Muslim Brotherhood to transform the entire judiciary into a much more domesticated structure that rules as per the executive's orientation. On the other hand, staffing or patronage would help the Muslim Brotherhood reward its army of aspirant lawyers who have been denied their expected share in the national cake, predominantly staffed by the Brotherhood's physicians and engineers. As part of the Brotherhood's masterpiece victimisation story, its loyalists and sympathisers have always claimed that the ousted regime discriminatorily impeded their access to the judiciary and the general prosecution. However, such claims are not entirely true, as events revealed there have been judges, including some at senior levels, who have been highly affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Beyond patronage and office rewards for Brotherhood members, the new staff would be the Trojan horse of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates of Islamists to accomplish their objective of the Islamisation of laws, or more specifically of judicial verdicts. In fact, this has been one of the hidden motives of the Brotherhood's ongoing assault on the judiciary, taking into consideration the new constitution with its 219 articles that has paved the way to a broader role for Sharia as the major source of legislation. In other words, staffing of judicial institutions with Brotherhood loyalists would induce a change from within in the domain of the implementation of Sharia seriously. Islamisation of laws has been pursued by Islamists since the introduction of Article 2 in the 1971 constitution, stipulating that “Islamic jurisprudence is the principle source of legislation.” Accordingly, many lawyers with strong affiliations to Islamists have endeavoured to use courts — particularly the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) — to raise lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of what they believed to be the most formidable secular foundations of the state. Moreover, many primary court judges have referred laws to the SCC claiming they contradict Article 2 of the constitution. Important to mention, the SCC, the Muslim Brotherhood regime's major target of aggression, has been a very active forum for deciding on the conformity of challenged laws to Islamic Sharia. Yet the SCC has been very cautious in addressing and deciding on the constitutionality of laws on the grounds of Article 2. In dealing with such thorny issues, the SCC has issued a legal principle that the amendment of Article 2 in 1980 making Islamic Sharia the main not a major source of legislation, as stipulated in 1971 constitution, would not have a retrospective impact on standing laws. Rather, the SCC stressed that such conformity with Article 2 would be only enforced on newly enacted laws following the 1980 amendment. Moreover, the SCC has laid out a legal principle that has had a different interpretation of the sources of Islamic Sharia, and according to Nathan J Brown and Clark Lombardi, the reorganisation of the SCC will make the court's stance change to one friendlier to neo-traditional understandings as stipulated in Article 219 of the new constitution. Therefore, it can be said that the Muslim Brotherhood's objective of domination of the judiciary will help accelerate the process of implementing Sharia, as all Islamists have been pursuing. A litany of historical reasons also lies behind the Muslim Brotherhood's organic distrust of certain judicial institutions, namely the SCC and the prosecutor general. It can be said that a psychological barrier leaves the Brotherhood viscerally opposed to both the SCC, established by Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1969, and the ex-prosecutor general appointed by Mubarak in 2006. The two institutions have been demonised by the regime and its supporters. Over years, the Brotherhood became frustrated with the stands these two institutions took versus the association's detained or imprisoned members. Certain rulings from the SCC, and some decisions from the general prosecutor, shaped the legal context of the conflict between the ousted regime and the then outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Long before the SCC verdict of last June dissolving the People's Assembly with its predominant Islamist majority, the Brotherhood had bad memories of the SCC. The issue started with a ruling of the Administrative Court against trying civilians before the military courts. The ruling was later overturned by the Supreme Administrative Court. Important to mention that the commonest stratagem adopted by Mubarak's regime was to transfer Muslim Brotherhood members to be tried before military courts instead of State Security Courts that occasionally ruled against the regime's expectations, vindicating defendants. In view of that discrepancy, the government requested an authoritative interpretation of the military judiciary in terms of the president's right to refer civilians to be tried before military tribunals. And in effect, the SCC did issue its final and irrevocable interpretation, confirming the right of the president to refer civilians to military courts. Accordingly Mubarak's regime utilised this legitimating verdict to curb the leaders of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood through military courts lacking sufficient procedural guarantees. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood has not either forgotten or forgiven the verdict of the SCC. Meanwhile, the new unilateral constitution promulgated by Morsi's regime drastically impacted the hard-won independence of the SCC got from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in 2011, which transformed the SCC to a fully independent court that has been solely empowered to manage all its affairs, including selection of its chief justice. Indeed, this assault illustrated the real motives of the regime in terms of exerting full executive control on the judicial institutions. The prosecutor general, on the other hand, has been another actor in the intimidation of the Muslim Brotherhood among the regime's political opponents for many years under Mubarak, where stark illegal detentions and even torture cases were deliberately neglected by the prosecutor general's office. Ideologically, the Muslim Brotherhood — particularly its Qutbi leadership (followers of Islamist ideologue Sayed Qutb) — has not looked with great esteem at secular law and its institutions. For many of such leaders, such laws and institutions are seen as non-Islamic that should be changed if not demolished. The differences among such leaders have been over the pace and magnitude of such changes. Accordingly, many such leaders have been ideologically committed to pursuing a destructive attitude towards the judiciary. The regime's assault on the judiciary is a complex act, with many factors /motives that have been ceaselessly interacting, pushing the regime to transform the judiciary. This process has been both the end as well as the means of the regime to induce a profound and sustainable change within Egypt's state and society.
