EGYPT'S lawyers on Wednesday continued their open-ended strike nationwide despite a meeting that was held between Chairman of the Bar Association Hamdi Khalifa and Speaker of the People's Assembly Ahmed Fathi Sorour that focused on defusing an escalating crisis between the lawyers on the one hand and judges and prosecutors on the other. "An effort is underway to calm the crisis and find a way out of it," said Khalifa after one-hour talks with the top lawmaker. He declined to give details about the discussions with Sorour or how the crisis would be resolved. Lawyers Ehab Ibrahim and Moustafa Fatouh had reportedly assaulted Tanta Prosecutor Basem Abul Roos last week. They tried to slap him in the face for allegedly maltreating them. They were sentenced to five years in jail each on Wednesday and their appeal will be heard next Saturday. As the hearings of the two lawyers' trial opened in the Delta city of Tanta last Monday, around 5,000 lawyers held a demonstration outside the courtroom calling for the cancellation of the trial and the release of the two lawyers. "Sorour promised to intervene in order to end the crisis," said MP Ibrahim el-Gogari, the deputy chairman of the People's Assembly's Legislative Committee who attended the meeting on Saturday. He added that this crisis did not indicate that there was competition between the judges and lawyers. “It's just a temporary, exceptional incident that will end soon.” Outside and inside the Bar Association in central Cairo, lawyers held a protest calling for “more respect” for them and urging the release of their detained colleagues. They raised banners reading “justice is not judges” and “lawyers are partners in justice”. "Unless talks bear fruit, we have no way other than to approach international agencies in order to release our colleagues who were unjustly detained," one of the protesting lawyers said. He added that there were some other escalatory measures that could be taken in case “the judges turned deaf ears” to the lawyers' demands. Lawyers in Cairo, Qalubia, Gharbia and some other governorates went ahead with their strike yesterday, refusing to deal with the judges except in the emergency cases as the Bar Association formed committees in each governorate to organise the strike. 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”. He told a press conference last week, "We will never accept any apology from these lawyers. They should have known how to respect the representative of justice." He added that the strike staged by the lawyers would never “affect justice”. Rising tensions and assaults between the lawyers and prosecutors seem to have pointed to the presence of a real problem in the relationship between Egypt's lawyers and its judges and prosecutors.
