CAIRO: A group of lawyers expressed their willingness to the ruling military council to help monitor parliamentary elections, responding to an alleged threat by judges to boycott the process. Several members of the Freedoms Committee of the Lawyers Syndicate presented Sunday a suggestion to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), to have the cassation court lawyers supervise parliamentary and presidential elections as well as the referendum on the yet-to-be drafted constitution. The committee said in a statement that the suggestion is an attempt to avoid a crisis in case judges uphold their threat to boycott elections. Judges said they didn't make such threat, blaming a misunderstanding in media reports. On its website, the Lawyers Syndicate said that Tarek Ibrahim, member of the committee and one of the lawyers behind the proposal, said that lawyers wanted to provide a safe and trustworthy alternative that is also legally and technically qualified to monitor the elections. According to the statement, the proposed supervising commission would consist of trusted senior lawyers from the Court of Cassation so that the lawyers-judges strife would not be a pretext to postpone the legislative elections. However, not all lawyers agreed to the proposal. "This is illegal. Judicial supervision over legislative elections is a constitutional obligation on judges and there is no legal alternative to that," said Mohamed El-Damaty, former member of the lawyers' syndicate board and rapporteur of the freedoms committee. The only acceptable form of such a suggestion, he said, is to oversee the elections to guarantee their integrity within the framework of judicial supervision. "The judges withdrew their threat when they realized they are compelled by the constitution to supervise these elections," he added. On a related note, Damaty pointed out that the dilemma of Egyptian expats voting abroad is centered on the shortage of judges available to supervise the procedure. Justice Ahmed Mekky, former vice president of the court of cassation, denied media reports that judges threatened to boycott parliamentary elections at any point pointing out that this might be a misunderstanding. "When judges were demanded to supervise the legislative elections they insisted that it should be secured to guarantee its integrity," he said. Justice Ahmed El-Zend, head of Judges Club, called upon judges Friday to boycott the elections of the Lawyers Syndicate; yet, some media outlets reported that judges threatened to boycott the parliamentary elections to push SCAF to pass the Judicial Authority Law. The threat to boycott the Lawyers Syndicate elections on Nov. 20 was the latest episode in an ongoing spat between the judges and lawyers over a draft judicial authority law which lawyers reject. A number of lawyers and civil society activists protested against the judicial authority law as the judges' general assembly meeting took place. The controversial article 18 in the proposed law would allow a judge to arrest lawyers for contempt of court. Hundreds of protesters closed the entrances to the High Court to prevent judges from leaving the building and later tried to storm the courthouse, which led one judge to fire gunshots in the air to disperse the crowd.
