of effective sanctions against husbands who failed to comply with court orders.
Thus, Zulficar and other members at the NCW legislative committee set out to work on PSL No. 10. Zulficar played a central role in the NCW committee work on the new family court law. She provided detailed comments and revisions to the draft law PSL No. 10, which the Ministry of Justice had prepared, working closely with other members of the committee such as Judge Mahmoud Ghoneim from the Judiciary Inspection Unit at the Supreme Constitutional Court. Zulficar also served on the joint committee, which was subsequently formed from the Ministry of Justice, the NCW, and the NCCM, to revise the draft law.
Zulficar shared with me a folder containing documents pertaining to her committee work. In the folder, she kept a record of the committee work on PSL No. 1, PSL No. 10, and PSL No. 11. The folder contained, among other things, several versions of the draft law for the new family courts showing its development. The folder also contained written comments and suggestions from the NCW committee members; comments and recommendations from the NCCM; and a report from the NDP. The NDP report argued that the social and economic challenges caused by lengthy court procedures and ineffective mechanisms of enforcement necessitate a series of legal reforms, one of which would be the establishment of a new courts system with alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution. The report also discussed the role that civil society and the ruling party could play in promoting the proposed legal reforms.10 Another document in the folder outlined briefly the NCW plan to work on a new initiative for a comprehensive family law that would address various gender-based inequalities in the existing laws such as unilateral repudiation, judicial divorce, polygamy, wifely obedience, and so on.11 On the whole, the contents of the folder reflected the ways in which the various legal reforms that were being introduced or planned at the time were interconnected. The enclosed documents also reflected the close collaboration between the NCW and the NDP with regard to these various legal reforms.
The agenda driving the government’s advocacy for the new legal reforms, including the new family courts, was driven by multiple interrelated goals. The Egyptian state saw the reform of personal status laws as a means of modernizing the country, enhancing its development, and enabling state governance of the family (and thus of society). The state agenda was also driven by the goal of maintaining the support of international donors and the international community by navigating the country’s commitments toward international conventions pertaining to gender equality such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), while at the same time avoiding the opposition of the religious establishment and conservative sectors in Egyptian society. Scholars of Egyptian family laws such as Ron Shaham (1999) and Nadia Sonneveld (2012) noted, for example, the chronological proximity between various family law reforms since Sadat’s era and onward, and the holding of international conferences on women’s issues and rights. PSL No. 44 of 1979 was passed before the July 1980 United Nations World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. PSL No. 100 of 1985 was enacted before the UN Conference on Women in Nairobi that took place in the same year. The new marriage contract proposal was considered by the government after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. And lastly, the latest legal reforms (that is, PSLs No. 1, No. 10, and No. 11) were passed before the United Nations World Conference on Women in 2005 and the 2005 World Summit. The influence of the international community in pushing through these legal reforms is also illustrated by the fact that PSL No. 10 of 2004 was drafted and promulgated in a little over a year and the new family courts began to operate in 2004, even before its central and distinct features could be implemented (separate and adequate premises, specialized judges, adequate training of judges and other court personnel, and so on).
The state discourse that linked the legal empowerment of women to the development of the country and its international standing was also reflected in the fact that the reform of personal status laws constituted a central component of the NCW’s five-year national strategy at that time (2005–2010). One key component in the strategy aimed at improving the implementation of PSLs Nos. 10, 1, and 11. Another component of the strategy aimed at lobbying for a new and comprehensive substantive personal status law that would revisit all aspects of marital and parental rights and obligations. The third component of the strategy focused on creating a societal environment that is conducive to the sound implementation of the new personal status laws through: carrying out awareness-raising campaigns, supporting efforts to appoint female judges in the new family courts and in the State Judiciary Council, and strengthening women’s scope for agency and autonomy by facilitating their acquisition of national identity cards and registering them to vote. The fourth component of the NCW strategy was aimed at eliminating discrimination against women in other state laws such as labor, social welfare, citizenship, and criminal cases. The fifth and last component of the strategy linked the aforementioned goals of the legal empowerment of women to the international arena and its global feminist agenda by aiming at removing the reservations that Egypt placed on CEDAW.
The understanding of the new family courts as part of a state project to modernize its institutions and improve their performance was also reiterated by a senior administrator at the NCW, Isis Mahmoud, who was the general coordinator of all committees at the NCW and the focal point between the council and the parliament. As part of her responsibilities, Mahmoud attended the meetings of the legislative committee at the time. She noted that the NCW first proposed the idea of establishing the new courts to the Shura Council in 1998 as part of the council’s national plan to modernize and develop the legal institutions and accordingly facilitate women’s access to justice (two goals that the council saw as interconnected).12 Subsequently, the Shura Council included the call for the establishment of unified and specialized family courts in its 1998 report that outlined the gaps in personal status laws. Since 2002, the legislative committee at the NCW led the lobbying and advocacy efforts toward the establishment of new family courts. Furthermore, when the new courts began to function in 2004, the NCW established a special committee to monitor its work, led by Amal Ousman, a lawyer and former minister of social affairs and former speaker of parliament.
The new family courts were also a development goal that the government pursued with support from international donors. For example, the training of the judges and the mediators in the court settlement offices was administered by both the Ministry of Justice and the NCCM through a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project called the Family Justice. This five-year project officially started in December 2006 and aimed at supporting the implementation of PSL No. 10 by training and developing the skills of court personnel, raising awareness about the new courts, and collaborating with NGOs to provide preventive support to families and children at risk. In the preparatory stage of the Family Justice Project, Zulficar and Takla conducted a series of one-day workshops for judges and other court personnel, to educate them about the new law. Also, under this project, a series of training workshops was organized by the National Center for Judicial Studies. Counselor Tosson, who had previously undertaken the study on the gaps in the procedural and substantive personal status laws, was assigned the responsibility of planning these training workshops. Tosson and her team organized three-day workshops for the judges, one-week workshops for the court-based settlement specialists and court experts who would be undertaking the mandatory pre-litigation and while-litigation mediation respectively, and one-week workshops for public prosecutors. These training sessions, which targeted courts nationwide, lasted six months.
Another goal underlying the state’s role in legislating the new family courts and other related legal reforms was connected to what Frances Hasso calls the “governmentalizing project.” In her book on family crisis and the state, Hasso argues that the processes of reforming family laws in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have often been part of the state’s “governmentalizing project.” Hasso focuses on Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and specifically on recent new laws tackling different types of legally and socially contested marriages. She explains how “legal rationalization” and reform in family laws became mechanisms by which the state managed the population and the society, through
