EIPR Analysis: Overturning of Mubarak and Adli Conviction Expected Outcome of a Flawed Trial

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Jan 17, 2013 Egypt
[Poster outside Mubarak`s 2011 trial. Image by Maggie Osama via Flickr] [Poster outside Mubarak`s 2011 trial. Image by Maggie Osama via Flickr]

EIPR Analysis: Overturning of Mubarak and Adli Conviction Expected Outcome of a Flawed Trial

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release and report were issued by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights on 13 January 2013.]

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said that the Court of Cassation’s ruling today to overturn the conviction of ousted president Mubarak and his interior minister Habib al-Adli was the expected outcome of a flawed, disappointing trial. The EIPR said that the retrial must avoid the grave mistakes of the first trial that led to the annulment of the judgments issued.

In a report issued today titled “Mubarak’s First Trial: A Wasted Opportunity for Justice,” the EIPR offers a legal and political analysis of the trial and its flaws from the initial investigations to the issuance of the judgment in June 2012. 

The report also contains recommendations on how to avoid the same blunders and defects in the retrial, most significantly a recommendation to again refer the case file to the Public Prosecution for the inclusion of new evidence and to name the actual killers of revolutionaries as new defendants in the case. 

“The trial was disappointing from the beginning of the investigations and through the pronouncement of the judgment,” said Hoda Nasrallah, an attorney with EIPR’s criminal justice unit. “Despite popular optimism that justice would be served after seeing Mubarak and his cronies behind bars in court, what we ended up seeing were superficial, negligent inquiries that did not aspire to identify the real perpetrators of the crimes. Moreover, the trial was limited to crimes committed in the first seven days of the Revolution and to those victims who died or were injured in public squares only.”

She added, “The verdict in the case came as a huge shock, exonerating the security apparatus of any responsibility for demonstrators’ deaths and convicting the ex-president and his interior minister only because they failed to intervene to stop the killing, which the court ruled was committed by unknown elements.”

In its analysis, the EIPR states that the primary cause of the flawed judgment handed down by the Cairo felony court was that the prosecution went through the same security and judicial channels that were designed to protect the Mubarak regime and prevent any accountability even after the president stepped down. The personnel in these institutions, their structure and the legislative framework that governs them remained unchanged. 

The EIPR’s analysis notes that politics, not a quest for justice, was the principal factor determining the conduct of those overseeing the trial, both in the Public Prosecution and the judicial panel. The Public Prosecution faced harsh criticism in the case for its severe dereliction of duty, its unjustified delay in opening an investigation and the fact that at times it was extremely slow to refer defendants to trial while at others it was unaccountably swift in completing its investigation. Moreover, the investigation ignored some suspects though evidence suggests their involvement in the crimes being prosecuted, yet further indication of the prosecution’s failure to identify the actual perpetrators. 

Regarding the performance of the bench, the EIPR analysis notes that the court disregarded motions by lawyers for the victims to separate the charges of killing demonstrators from the corruption charges. It also rejected motions by victims’ lawyers to return the case file to the Public Prosecution to include the names of the original perpetrators as respondents in the case. Furthermore, the court panel refused to allow victims’ attorneys to question Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi during his testimony. 

The EIPR analysis adds that the court disregarded the statements of more than 1,300 witnesses taken by the prosecution and cited as evidence in the referral order to prove that police were responsible for the murder and attempted murder of demonstrators. The court also ignored strong evidence in the case file, not to mention an enormous number of medical reports, material evidence seized including weapons, ammunition and live ammunition, the weapons logs from Central Security Forces divisions and video footage submitted by the Public Prosecution and provided by the plaintiffs and regular citizens, as well as the report of the first fact-finding commission on the events of the January revolution, all of which indicates police involvement in the killing of demonstrators. 

Disregarding all this evidence, the court acquitted Adli’s aides, citing the fact that “the case documentation and seized items contain no evidence to persuade the court that the original perpetrators were police officers and personnel.” This is a clear indication of the stark politicization of the trial.

Today the Court of Cassation ruled to accept the appeal on all judgments issued by the criminal court on 2 June 2012, which included the conviction and life sentence for Mubarak and al-Adli for involvement in the crimes of murder and attempted murder, the acquittal of all al-Adli’s aides and the dismissal of the criminal suit filed against Mubarak, his sons and fugitive businessman Hussein Salem on charges of graft and fraud due to the statute of limitations. The Court of Cassation ordered that the cases be retried in another circuit.

The EIPR recommends taking the necessary measures to prevent the same mistakes and flaws in the retrial, including: 

  1. Grant motions by victims’ lawyers to refer the case file to the Public Prosecution pursuant to Article 11 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, for the inclusion of further evidence and to name new defendants, the original perpetrators.
  2. Deal seriously with the material evidence and the findings of fact-finding commissions that investigated the events of the January revolution, especially those of the committee formed by President Mohamed Morsy after he assumed office in July 2012.
  3. Provide all due process guarantees, including holding a public trial, providing the right to defense, protecting witnesses and compensating victims.
  4. Establish an instrument independent of the judicial and executive apparatus to investigate all cases of death or serious injury committed by police, so that the security bodies charged with involvement are not responsible for investigating or collecting evidence for the charges against them.

[Click here to download the report in Arabic.]
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412