of the outcome of the lawsuit.
Takla stresses that the kind of justice provided by the new family courts system is one that “takes off its blinders to see the children and all the parties concerned, to hear what they say, and to feel what they feel” (2004: 11; my emphasis). Hence, it is necessary to have well-trained court personnel who are specialists in family affairs and who understand and espouse the philosophy of this legal system. The rationale for establishing specialized family courts, Takla argues, is not only to support women, but the whole family. This point is strongly made in Takla’s following quote: “family courts are not established for women, but for women and men, for the wife, the husband, the son, the brother, the children, and the relatives” (2004: 12). Takla sees that one of the important strengths of this new courts system is its participatory processes, which create space for disputants and court personnel to partake collectively in the resolution of the dispute. In short, Takla sees the new family courts system as one that provides therapeutic, problem-solving justice, and hence, a system that addresses not only the legal, but also the social aspects of the conflict.
While Takla viewed the new family courts as primarily a mechanism for delivering family-oriented justice, other influential advocates of the new courts system pursued this legal reform for different goals. These advocates were both individual actors and state institutions. The individual actors were a group of prominent women’s rights advocates who adopted the initiative of the new family courts as part of their larger goal of lobbying for a series of legal reforms to address the inequalities and challenges that women faced in the family domain. These advocates pursued their goal through their roles in state institutions. But these institutions also had their own goals for pushing for legal reforms such as the new family courts. For them, the new courts system was part of a state project aimed at realizing the goals of development and modern governance intertwined with state feminism,5 a project influenced in part by factors such as the country’s international standing and its commitments vis-à-vis international organizations, international conventions, and aid donors. These state institutions were the NCW, the NDP, and the NCCM.
Among these prominent women’s rights advocates were Mona Zulficar. Zulficar is a legal expert in investment banking law and the cofounder of and senior partner at the Shalakany Law Office. She served on numerous international committees working on gender and women’s rights. Since the late 1980s, Zulficar had been a key figure in a relatively loose coalition of women’s rights activists, academics, senior legal figures, government officials, and public thinkers who lobbied for a series of new personal status laws with the goal of addressing gender-based inequalities faced by women (Singerman 2005). The resultant reforms from these efforts were the new marriage contract, PSL No. 1 of 2000, PSL No. 10 of 2004, PSL No. 11 of 2004, and PSL No. 4 of 2005. Zulficar had also been a longtime key member of the NCW legislative committee.
The late Zeinab Radwan and Fawzeya Abdel-Sattar were two other prominent professional women who, like Zulficar, made use of their roles in the NCW (and the NDP) to lobby for gender-sensitive legal reforms. Radwan was professor of Islamic philosophy and former dean of the Faculty of Dar al-Ulum, Cairo University, Fayoum branch. She was also the deputy speaker of the parliament from 2005 to 2010, and served on the NCW executive and legislative committees. Radwan pursued her advocacy work both through her role as a member of the NDP Women’s Committee and her role as a scholar with expert knowledge in Islamic religious sciences. Radwan, in fact, played a key role in the NDP proposal for a comprehensive, gender-sensitive family law, which I will elaborate on in chapter 5.
Abdel-Sattar, professor of criminal law at Cairo University, directed the legislative committee in parliament from 1990 to 1995.6 She chaired the NCW legislative committee from 2000 to 2001. Like Radwan and Zulficar, she was also part of the coalition that lobbied for PSL No. 1 of 2000. Abdel-Sattar, furthermore, published a book titled al-Mar’a fi-l-tashri‘at al-masriya (The Woman in Egyptian Legislation), as part of an NCW initiative to advocate for legal reforms to address gender-based inequalities. The book examines women’s legal rights in different domains and highlights the existing gaps hindering gender equality (Abdel-Sattar 2000). Abdel-Sattar devotes a chapter in the book to the gender-based shortcomings in personal status laws and points out the connections among gender inequalities in different legal domains. Three updated editions of the book were published by the NCW, the latest being in 2005. In the third edition, the author also added explanations and comments on the new laws that were passed, including PSL No. 10.
In lobbying for the new laws that were introduced in the period from 2000 to 2005, Zulficar and her colleagues adopted a two-pronged reform strategy. One prong was to employ procedural reforms as a pathway to gradually and strategically addressing gender inequality and expanding women’s rights. The second prong was to pursue gender reforms through close work with relevant state institutions. Zulficar was the key figure in this circle of prominent women’s rights advocates who was closely involved in the lobbying for the new family courts. She took note of the idea of specialized, mediation-based family courts in the mid-1990s when she became informed about Takla’s writings and initiative at the Association for the Union of Egyptian Women Lawyers, an association of which she was also a member. During this time, Zulficar was already lobbying for PSL No. 1 through her role as the deputy convener of the legislative committee at the NCW.7 Zulficar believed that since women constituted the largest number of litigants in personal status cases and were often the more disadvantaged in the legal process, they would benefit greatly from the main features of the new courts system, namely: specialized judiciary, alternative mechanisms of dispute resolution, and mechanisms of enforcement of court judgments.8
The idea of reforming the court system as a necessary step in the pursuit of gender justice was also justified by the recorded experiences of female disputants, which highlighted the many gaps in the system hindering women from obtaining fair and quick resolutions in family disputes. In 1999, for instance, Nefertiti Tosson, a senior counselor at the National Center for Judicial Studies in the Ministry of Justice, undertook a study on women’s access to justice in five personal status courts over a three-month period. The study, which was under the auspices of the Alliance for Arab Women, was part of an initiative to gather evidence-based arguments for the legal reforms that were being proposed at the time. Tosson pointed out to me that before she undertook the study, she read the draft PSL No. 1 which the Ministry of Justice had prepared then in coordination with the NCW.9 Tosson and her team researched the procedural and substantive laws regulating divorce, maintenance, post-divorce compensation alimony (nafaqat al-mut‘a), and obedience awards. The study found numerous gaps that resulted in lengthy and unjust legal processes for female disputants. One of the main recommendations of the study was to establish a specialized and unified legal system that would handle all personal status cases.
In addition to Tosson’s study, an extensive body of international and national literature also found gaps in the previous court system that disadvantaged women. For example, the number of divorce cases that were being filed yearly was staggering. Some of the studies estimated it as half a million divorce cases per year (Hammond 2000; Shah 2000). Other sources estimated that a quarter million women resorted to court every year (Sakr and Hakim 2001; Tadros 2000), resulting in an enormous backlog of five million cases. The number of judges, furthermore, was insufficient. For example, in 1997, fourteen million lawsuits were filed but there were only four thousand judges to preside over all cases (Singerman 2005). These gaps as well as others had their adverse effects on women disputants in particular. For example, whereas a man could divorce his wife unilaterally and without the need for court permission, divorce cases initiated by women sometimes lasted several years during which female disputants’ lives and future plans were put on hold. Furthermore, court orders that obligated husbands to pay spousal and child maintenance were frequently hard to implement because of corrupt and poorly trained law enforcement
