Hand-in-hand with the fight against political corruption, a new range of crimes -- those of prejudice, bigotry and religious chauvinism -- should enter into law books, writes Azmi Ashour* Against the backdrop of the social value that derives from the philosophy that urges the creation of laws to punish and prevent crimes against individuals and society, one wonders how close existing laws are to the concept of justice. Consider, for example, that there are certain crimes that continue to be perpetrated in our societies due to the absence of legal provisions criminalising these acts, which in turn stems from the failure to respond to changing times and the conditions in which these crimes occur. There are various reasons for the legislative stagnation and inflexibility that led law in Arab cultures to deviate from the principle of justice. Prime among the causes are social underdevelopment and the lack of mature legislative institutions with the probity and sense of higher purpose to generate a revolution in the creation and enforcement of laws. This absence has been compounded by the existence of despotic ruling elites endowed with powers to tailor the law to their own self-serving purposes. A third cause is prevalent religious fundamentalism and the obsession with Sharia law, which works to stifle creativity and legislative development since, in the minds of those who advocate its universal application, Sharia defines and remedies all existing crimes and those that will arise in the future. These factors, combined, have generated modes of behaviour intrinsically related to the phenomena of political and religious tyranny. One cannot escape the observation that the heads of the former regime are being tried on charges based on existing laws, such as the prohibition against illegal gain, rather than for grosser and more pervasive crimes that were a product of their political behaviour and acts. The glaring difference between the magnitude of the actual crimes perpetrated by the accused and the charges they are facing has led many to jest that the proceedings before the courts are closer to mock trials than to prosecutions of political officials who grossly abused their powers. To the Egyptian people, the central issue is not so much Gamal Mubarak's alleged illicit gains as it is the fact that as a key political player for the past 10 years he was directly responsible for the spread of political corruption through the various schemes and machinations aimed at promoting his rise to power after has father and that generated a coterie of economic and political beneficiaries and acolytes with vested interests in his succession, among whom are a number of ministers who face prosecution today. Therefore, in this post-revolutionary period in particular, it is important to invoke the articles of law that have a bearing on political crimes or to legislate for such laws if they do not already exist. It hardly serves the principle of justice not to try political officials precisely for the disastrous policies and political behaviour that wrought widespread damage to their societies. The world's revolutions may have instituted the custom of retaliatory trials against the leaders of overthrown regimes. However, to me it seems far more important to criminalise the types of acts perpetrated by ruling elites in such cases as ours where the legal structures have yet to provide the mechanisms for political accountability, not only to prevent the abuse of power for personal gain but also to control the ways in which officials exercise their powers, to ascertain their qualifications for high office and to serve as checks against decision-making processes and policies that can be so profoundly detrimental as to impoverish society and drag it ages backwards over the course of the decades that some megalomaniac might chose to stay in power. If this spirit is applied, the prosecution of former regime heads will be less a fulfilment of the thirst for vengeance and more in the nature of an inauguration of a legislative and political revival, for it will have established a powerful deterrent to any future rulers who will know they will be subject to the law of political accountability in the event that they succumb to any temptation to abuse their office. The question of political accountability brings me to another extremely important complementary issue, which I will term "crimes of backwardness". Against the unfolding trials of former regime members on charges of political and economic abuse and corruption, should we not also consider the possibility of promulgating laws against ideas, values and modes of behaviour that work to propel society backwards, through the systematic closing of minds, by forcing a retreat into the past and a rejection of the present, thereby jeopardising our future? Is the spirit of justice broad enough to embrace the notion of criminalising attitudes and behaviours that can be detrimental to society? Surely those responsible for such a crime against society should not be able to get off lightly merely because they disguise their callings beneath a religious varnish. Take, for example, advocates of shutting off avenues to intercultural communications and prohibiting access to the sources of modern knowledge on the grounds that -- according to them -- they are the products of heretics. Are they not guilty of a crime against the human intellect and against Egyptian society that needs to invest in the proper education of its children to equip them with the knowledge and knowhow that will enable them to meet the demands of the present and to help their society advance? What a succession of trials we would have if promoting backwardness were criminalised. Up there in the defendant's dock would be people guilty of issuing sweeping judgments against others, spreading prejudice, and inciting hatred and sectarian strife. I would suggest, for example, reopening trials against Islamist groups that practiced terrorism during the past three decades, causing irreparable damage to Egyptian society and its people. Those crimes, like the crimes perpetrated by the Mubarak regime, should not be subject to a statute of limitations. Certainly it would defy all sense of justice to see Mubarak in prison while those guilty of incitement to hatred and terrorism have re- emerged from prison, not only unreformed and unrepentant, but proud of their past crimes and reconfirmed in their extremism. Surely incitement to bigotry, close- mindedness and insularism is no less serious a crime than, say, slander, theft and abuse of public funds, since they work to deprive society of the potentially creative and productive minds of its youth which, instead of being put to the service of the advancement and development of society, are turned into instruments of destruction and deterioration. The demand for the application of a comprehensive concept of justice is urgent. It offers a way out of a vicious cycle of despotism, a way to avert the prospect that society will emerge from the shadow of political tyranny only to fall into the grips of another form of tyranny, under a religious guise. If the trials of former regime figures are meant to deter the repetition of financial and political crimes, then similar trials are required to prevent the repetition of terrorist crimes and crimes of backwardness and regression on the part of the types of forces that have re-emerged into the political arena and are currently taking advantage of the freedoms and instruments of modern civilisation to denounce these freedoms and this civilisation as heresies. The hypocrisy is astounding. They feign the dress and speech of the earliest eras of Islam and yet are as remote as can be from the magnanimity, open-mindedness and rationality that characterised the leaders of those eras. Hopefully, our concept of justice and our corpus of laws will grow sophisticated enough to criminalise all acts that are detrimental to society, including acts that stem from erroneous religious beliefs, which give rise to prejudice, hatred and racism. Laws against such crimes of backwardness should be no less stringent than the laws against political and financial corruption in view of the disastrous social and economic effects they can wreak on society. Until such laws are in place, such crimes will continue to serve to manufacture tyranny and despotism in their political and religious forms. * The writer is a political analyst.
