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Any democracy worthy of the label requires (among other things) a relatively efficient and impartial judiciary. Yet today, more than five years after the regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled, attempts to reform the judiciary (which encompasses some 16,000 employees) are proceeding slowly at best.

“If you go to a working-class cafe, you might run into someone you passed judgment on,” he tells me. “You have an image to maintain in society. You have to give a positive example.” (In Tunisia, it would seem, the upper classes don’t often find themselves in court.)

The old autocrats — Ben Ali and his predecessor Habib Bourguiba — habitually regarded the courts as an extension of their own executive power, and used them to crack down on their political opponents and bolster their allies. Judges who resisted would get reassigned to backwater postings.

the judiciary does have incomplete but real institutional guarantees of independence: It has a long history; a sense of mission to the rule of law; an impressive and well-developed legal framework; considerable autonomy in personnel and budgetary matters; constitutional guarantees of independence and due process; and rulers who routinely pledge fealty to the rule of law. But six problems have been on full display in recent years – and while the first three are likely to get slowly better, the other three might even get a bit worse.

Perhaps the most important official was the prosecutor general – responsible for deciding whom to investigate and prosecute and whom to ignore. (For that reason, much of the judicial tussling among various political forces after the 2011 uprising has focused on this post.)

the judges generally have a very strong sense of loyalty to the Egyptian state and supporters of political and social order. As suspicious as they may sometimes be of executive influence, Egyptian judges tend not to behave as freestanding actors mediating between the state and the society or among various social actors, but as enforcers of the law and interests of the state, standing above and guiding the society in what they see as a principled fashion

From the moment the military seized control from President Hosni Mubarak, the generals “certainly” never intended to relinquish authority before supervising a new Constitution, Judge Gebali said

Judge Gebali said her own direct contacts with the generals began in May last year, after a demonstration by mostly liberal and secular activists demanding a Constitution or at least a bill of rights before elections. “This changed the vision of the military council,” she said. “It had thought that the only popular power in the street was the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The planned decree “was thwarted every time by all the noise, the popular mobilization, the ‘million-man marches,’ ” Judge Gebali said, blaming the Islamists even though they were only one part of the protests.

Those who looked to the courts to stop the constitutional process or roll back Morsi's actions have lost.

there is already a battle emerging over new entrants to the judiciary (and the public prosecution). Islamists feel (rightly, actually), that they have been excluded from these institutions. But their reaction -- to try to find ways to encourage their promising followers to choose judicial careers -- have led to understandable fears that the country's Islamist leadership may gradually "Brotherhoodize" important state institutions

most judges' conservatism is of a different nature: their job is to maintain order, not challenge it. While judges see themselves as acting in accordance with the law rather than the whim of the ruler, they also tend to view themselves as the bedrock of the state and society. When the majority of judges decided not to take part in oversight of the constitutional referendum last month, it was an unusual act of rebellion and one that I do not expect most to be willing to sustain. Some judicial actors (most notably the administrative courts and the Supreme Constitutional Court) have shown the will to take more ambitious positions on an ongoing basis, but even there I see signs of retreat to a more cautious pose

This controllable prosecutor-general, against which almost the entire prosecutorial corps protested and nearly succeeded in firing, was used quite clearly at will to go after the private media and the opposition as a direct extension of Morsi and the Brotherhood, while substantially legally shielding the Brotherhood at the same time.

In another breach of revolutionary consensus, Morsi and the Brotherood tightened control over state media and retained the nationally rejected role of information minister, already abolished briefly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak. State-owned papers and channels were subjected to appointments of allied or controllable leaderships. The media often ran familiar propaganda-esque headlines that seemed taken out of the Mubarak days. Furthermore, the press did not provide neutral and balanced coverage of events, and state TV was almost always forced to host a Brotherhood guest on every talk show, or at the very least not host an opposition figure on his own. Reports of guest blacklists also began to surface once more. Charges of “insulting the president” and “contempt of religion” began to pile up against media figures, often made by Brotherhood allies rather than directly by the Brotherhood (though the presidency did press some charges before retracting them under local and international pressure). Morsi and the Brotherhood seemed to care very little about fixing the problematic legislative framework for media, and gradually appeared to find it handy, especially with a prosecutor-general that was under full control. 

Although the original claim was that the Shura Council would only rubber stamp consensus legislation until the lower house would be elected, it was turned into a full parliament. It discussed far-reaching and controversial drafts, including: a non-governmental organization law that was widely seen as capable of stifling civil society in Egypt; divisive electoral and political rights laws that were criticized as favoring the Islamists; and even a disastrous judicial reform law that would have axed around 3,500 existing judges in an already choking legal system. The latter draft was openly seen as a move to get rid of judges that were problematic to the Brotherhood’s expansionary plans, while there were wide fears of intentions to replace them with a new generation of more sympathetic judges or outright Brotherhood members.

As many as 13,000 people were hanged in five years at a notorious Syrian government prison near Damascus, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, accusing the government of a "policy of extermination".Titled "Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging and extermination at Saydnaya prison," Amnesty's damning report is based on interviews with 84 witnesses, including guards, detainees, and judges.

victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government.

"They kept them (hanging) there for 10 to 15 minutes," a former judge who witnessed the executions said."For the young ones, their weight wouldn't kill them. The officers' assistants would pull them down and break their necks," he said.

Will any civilian winner be able to demilitarize the Egyptian state?

the discourse of presidential candidates avoids even acknowledging this situation, much less making a case for demilitarizing the state.

As Mubarak was grooming his son, Gamal, for presidency, he tried to ensure the loyalty of the military and stave off potential dissent by hiring military officers for economic and bureaucratic positions. The last 14 months, since the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) assumed power following Mubarak's departure, has seen a rapid increase in the number of officers in the civilian positions.

the man who’d been the first democratically elected president in the country’s history was confined in a soundproof glass booth, and authorities made major efforts to ensure that whatever he said during his brief appearance went largely unheard.State television offered no live broadcast, instead providing a heavily edited 30-minute video of the session that fast-forwarded through most of Morsi’s appearances

another indication that Egypt’s current government, installed by the military after it toppled Morsi last July, intends to keep trying to make sure that no space is provided for Morsi or his supporters from the Muslim Brotherhood to press their cases with the Egyptian people, amid signs that the military plans to maintain its influence

There were no Morsi supporters in the court, and many journalists who’d applied to cover the trial were denied access.

The coastal region is Kemalist, but the major cities, Istanbul and Ankara and most of Anatolia is for Erdoghan and the AK Party.

Turkish voters decided that they want the army to return to its barracks and not deployed on Turkey’s streets. They want generals and judges off the front pages of the newspapers, where they have been so prominent for a century. Officers and judges have viewed themselves as the guardians of the state rather than of law.

It strengthens gender equality and bars discrimination against children, the elderly, the disabled and veterans.

as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

After years of failed appeals, Samia and the human rights society are gearing up to face the Saudi Supreme Court which, according to Amnesty International's Saudi Arabia researcher Dina el-Mamoun, will be a tough battle. "It's difficult to win these cases because there are no clear guidelines in terms of what they have to prove. The judges have huge discretion in relation to these cases. The outcome really depends on which judge gets the case and who rules on it," says Ms Mamoun. Samia's case is not a one off. Across the oil-rich desert kingdom, dozens of women are taking guardianship grievances to court. And they are gaining public support. "I think in terms of public opinion, you do see a lot of sympathy with these women," says Ms Mamoun. Samia, now 43, is still clinging to her childhood dream of having a family. Her special man, she says, is waiting for her and fighting bravely alongside her.

It is safe to assume that if these affairs had been exposed before the era of social networks, Magal and Shalom would have pursued their political careers, at least as long as no complaint against them was filed with the police.

The tremendous power of social networks creates a hugely effective pressure group without the need for any form of legal process

The watershed in the fight against sexual harassment in Israel occurred in 1998, with passage of the law banning sexual harassment. The legislation, initiated by women, was considered at the time one of the most progressive in the world because of the precedent it set, recognizing the phenomenon of sexual harassment in the workplace and seeking to address it through the criminal code. The strength of the bill was in its definition of sexual harassment as a criminal act, but this was also its inherent weakness. Women were naturally and understandably reluctant to pay the price entailed in filing a police complaint and facing cross-examination on the witness stand in court. Absent a police complaint, the serial harassers, such as men in positions of power, could continue to operate uninterruptedly in the workplace.

Yasa found himself semi-conscious in hospital along with nine other protesters after Erdogan’s bodyguards and thugs for hire set upon them. One yelled “Die Kurd” as they kicked and struck the demonstrators with discernible glee. Lucy Usoyan, a young Yazidi woman who was repeatedly hit on the head, fell unconscious, despite Yasa’s best efforts to shield her. The images captured on video and later subjected to forensic scrutiny leave no doubt as to what had transpired. “I didn’t know if I would ever see my children again,” Yasa said. “I thought I was dying.”

In May, Yasa and a dozen and a half fellow victims filed a civil action lawsuit in US federal court against Turkey. They are demanding at least $300 million in compensation on multiple counts ranging from bodily harm to psychological trauma — including, in at least one case, damage to conjugal relations.

the tort case against the Republic of Turkey rests on the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act, which stipulates seven violations for which foreign governments can be sued in US courts. “I’d love to see Turkey argue that under US law, ‘We are entitled to beat up people on the streets of Washington, DC,'” Perles said. “No dictator gets to come to my country and beat up citizens of my country on my watch. I’ll take that argument all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.

in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.

His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.

MEE understands that the individuals present were Egyptian security officials who have been advising Saied before the coup and directing operations as it was taking place. It is unclear what role they played in Mechichi's interrogation.  "[Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-] Sisi offered to give Saied all the support he needed for the coup and Saied took it," one of the sources said. "Egyptian military and security people were sent to Tunisia with the full support of MbZ [Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi], the source added.

The moves undertaken on Sunday closely follow a plan of action outlined by Saied's close advisors in May and published by MEE at the time. The plan outlined a purge or wave of mass arrests that would take place after the announcement of what is referred to as a "constitutional coup".

presidential sources told MEE that Saied instructed his officials to draw up a list of targets of people who could be arrested.  To pave the way for this, Saied assumed control of both the civil and military judiciary and declared himself attorney general.

Judge Makram Awad gave five-year sentences in absentia to at least 15 U.S. citizens who left Egypt last year. He sentenced an American who stayed behind to two years in prison, and gave the same sentence to a German woman.

The Egyptian investigation focused on charges that the groups were operating without necessary approvals and had received funds from abroad illegally. Eleven Egyptians who faced lesser charges were handed one-year suspended sentences.

Egypt was run at the time by a military council that assumed power from deposed President Hosni Mubarak. Although the case is a legacy of that era, analysts say it further darkens prospects for an open society after the Islamist-led administration drew up a new NGO law seen as a threat to democracy.