The following excerpts are adapted from the author’s recent book, Counterrevolution in Egypt: Sisi’s New Republic, published by Verso Books.
The unification of the repressive apparatus for the first time since 1952 has meant drastic implications for the rest of the state institutions. The Second Republic was founded on contempt for civilians, civilian institutions, let alone civilian rule. Sisi embarked, with the full support of the senior brass, to militarise state organs and securitise public spaces in a quest to turn Egypt into what Michel Foucault envisioned as the ‘perfect military camp’. The military takeover of the state organs also involved a series of measures to discipline state officials and to ensure no civilian entity could hold Sisi and the army accountable. The usual pumping of retired officers into all echelons of state bureaucracy continued. A tally, by an independent Cairo think tank, revealed that at least a quarter of senior government appointments (cabinet ministers and governors), from July 2013 to July 2020, went to retired repressive apparatus officials, mostly from the military. The tally does not account for the thousands of retired officers who occupy posts in management boards of state companies or in the leading roles in the civil service institutions.
State Bureaucracy
In July 2022, Sisi announced the creation of the Egyptian Military Academy, under which fell the Military, Naval, Air Force, and Air Defence Colleges. In a move clearly aimed at facilitating future postretirement placements in the civilian sector for retired officers, Sisi decreed that Military College graduates would also be granted a BA in political science, economics, or statistics; Naval College graduates would receive a BA in political science; Air Force College graduates would be awarded BA in business administration or BS in computer science; while Air Defence College graduates would be given a BS in engineering. In July of the following year, Sisi added two more degrees to the Military College graduates: a BA in transportation and logistics management and a BS in computer science. Once they join the civilian sector, these retired officers, on the one hand, remain subject to the military judicial system, i.e. easy to control. On the other hand, through them, the repressive apparatus can influence the administrative dynamics of the state institutions and use the audit bodies to prosecute critics and those who constitute a threat to the senior brass interests.
Besides arming the officers with credentials that would enable their second careers after retirement, the Egyptian Military Academy and its affiliates have evolved into a primary tool for militarising the state organs. After testing the scheme in different ministries, the cabinet decreed by the end of April 2023 that the Egyptian Military Academy must vet all applicants for government jobs. They must now enrol for a six-month ‘course’ at the academy or its affiliates. In reality, it is a boot camp, where the applicants are dressed in military uniforms, undergo harsh physical training, and are humiliated like army conscripts, in addition to receiving ideological indoctrination that revolves around conspiracy theories and the pseudo-science of ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’.
The Ministry of Education has been among the earliest targets of the civil service militarisation programme, where the Egyptian Military Academy, sometimes in the presence of Sisi, filters out applicants for teaching jobs in the final stage of the selection process. However, the selection process is not only ideological to ensure the teachers do not harbour any ‘anti-state conspiratorial thoughts’. The applicants also undergo physical training, and those who are overweight or pregnant are rejected and told to change careers. Candidates for school director jobs are required to enrol in the same ideological indoctrination boot camp. In October 2023, hundreds of disqualified teachers demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Education’s headquarters – the first recorded labour protest in the New Administrative Capital – before the police dispersed them by tear gas, water cannons, and arrests.
Another ministry that has served as a testing ground for Sisi’s hypermilitarisation schemes is the Ministry of Transportation, led by Lieutenant General Kamel al-Wazir, the former head of the Engineering Authority of the Armed Forces. He is one of Sisi’s confidants, entrusted with the transportation sector, which receives the military’s lion’s share of interest with its lucrative contracts and deals. Wazir has acquired a notorious reputation as a ruthless minister, with fiery statements, usually blaming the citizens and low-ranking officials for any disasters. While applicants for civil service jobs at the ministry are screened by the Egyptian Military Academy, the Military Technological College has taken over the task of ‘training’ the technical workers in the sector, to militarise the blue-collar railway labour force. The first class of trainees graduated in August 2022, and the second in August 2023. By 2024, four classes of technical workers had already gone through the militarisation course, and the ministry started enrolling the river transport workers in the same programme. Railway and maritime safety engineers are now also required to attend the six-month boot camp at the Egyptian Military Academy.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Military Production is ‘training skilled labourers’ before sending them to work in the private sector. These militarised indoctrination courses are now standardised across the different civilian ministries, and the Ministry of Interior (MOI) has joined the efforts, regularly enrolling civil servants in ‘workshops’ held at the Police Academy on ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ and ‘confronting conspiracies to destroy the state’.
The Administrative Control Authority (ACA) has also emerged as a significant disciplining tool, after the coup, to enable politically motivated purges among the bureaucracy and private capital. Initially founded by Nasser in 1958, as a special section under the Administrative Prosecution Authority, it evolved by 1964 into an independent entity that reported to the ‘head of the executive council’. This was understood to be the prime minister, and in the following decades, the agency was in effect under the cabinet. The president still retained the power to appoint the ACA director and their deputy.
Though nominally a civilian institution, from its inception, virtually all the directors of the agency were military or General Intelligence Service (GIS) officers before the appointment of a police major general as an acting director in August 2022. A significant proportion of the ACA staff come from the military and police. The officers get to retain their ranks and pay grades. The ACA was tasked with combatting corruption and holding the executive branch of the state accountable for any violations. In practice, it was still part of the executive authority and selectively targeted officials based on the political considerations of the president. By law, the ACA was given powers like a security apparatus, such as information-gathering, surveillance, and making arrests. Nasser also created multiple oversight agencies, including the Accountability State Authority (also known as the Central Auditing Organisation). Under Sadat, the ACA’s role was reduced. He even went as far as dissolving the agency in 1980, after it investigated his half-brother. Mubarak reactivated the ACA in 1982, yet it was mandated to investigate corruption only when convenient for the president.
Although it was a valuable tool for successive presidents, it was overall marginal compared to the GIS, State Security Investigations Service (SS), or oversight agencies such as the Accountability State Authority. Only after the coup did the ACA start gaining sudden prominence. Upon the agency’s request, the MOI agreed in October 2013 to legally convert confined spaces within the twenty-nine ACA branches into detention and interrogation facilities in all twenty-seven provinces. Two months after he assumed office, Sisi visited the ACA headquarters in August 2014 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its founding – an event hardly celebrated in the previous decades, let alone remembered. Sisi declared a war on corruption and called on the heads of oversight agencies to ‘cooperate, coordinate and exchange information’.
In December of the same year, the government announced, in a conference also held in the ACA headquarters, the launch of the ‘National Anti-Corruption Strategy’, vowing a zero-tolerance policy regarding graft. From then on, almost weekly, and sometimes daily, news of the ACA operations and arrests began to flood the local news outlets in a fashion unseen in the previous decades. The mandate of the agency has expanded, even posing questions about its capacity to perform such tasks. Besides combatting corruption, the ACA was to fight organ trade, stop illegal migration, liaise with international organisations, and conduct training for state institutions, universities, and foreign officials. Starting in 2015, the ACA and the FBI ‘have increased cooperation’, according to the US Embassy in Cairo. ACA officers are sent to the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico for training.
While reorienting the ACA to its new mission, Sisi ensured he retained full control. In April 2015, Major General Muhammad Erfan, Sisi’s Military College classmate (Class 69), was appointed director after joining the ACA in 1986. In July 2015, Sisi decreed a law authorising him to impeach directors of oversight agencies and state institutions nominally independent of the executive branch. The law came amid Sisi’s clash with Hisham Geneina of the Accountability State Authority, who had exposed corruption in powerful bodies such as the State Security Prosecution Office and the ACA itself. The consequences were profound.
The removal of the popular Genina killed two birds with one stone. The regime got rid of an official who could not be controlled and at the same time delivered a shockwave through the bureaucracy: no one is immune from the long reach of the regime. The message was loud and clear: ‘get in line or get out’.
Two years later, Sisi introduced a legal amendment in October 2017 to place the ACA under his direct authority, instead of the prime minister. The amendment also explicitly stated that the mandate of the ACA was to be confined only to civilian institutions. In 2018, the rubber-stamp parliament approved a draft law, giving Sisi the power to set the pensions of the ACA personnel, without adhering to maximum or minimum wage ceilings. Furthermore, travel restrictions were imposed on senior bureaucrats to control their movement. Sisi decreed in 2019 that the prime minister, deputy prime minister, and the ministers of defence, interior, justice, and foreign affairs, as well as directors and deputy directors of all security and oversight agencies, could not travel abroad except with presidential approval. The decree also stipulated that the rest of the cabinet members (other than those mentioned above), governors, deputy governors, CEOs of holding companies, heads of national councils, and directors of public facilities, could not travel except with the permission of the prime minister.
Sisi’s most significant asset in the ACA ranks, however, has been his son, Mustafa. An army lieutenant colonel, Mustafa, joined the agency reportedly during Muhammad Farid al-Tuhami’s tenure. Mustafa has been his father’s enforcer and the de facto director. In May 2015, the government classified the ACA alongside the military and GIS, granting its contracts and bookkeeping secrecy for ‘national security considerations’. The ACA’s growing clout was evident when it raided the Egyptian Embassy in Berlin to investigate Ambassador Badr Abdelatty’s alleged corruption, without informing Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. A ministry official called the act ‘unbelievable and unprecedented’ and a ‘flagrant intervention in the management of his ministry’.
The ACA has been given a seat, usually alongside the military, GIS, and MOI, on the numerous councils, created or reactivated by Sisi, that oversee state policy towards a wide variety of issues. Whether the unprecedented empowerment of the ACA had an actual impact on corruption is a different story. In a 2018 report, Transparency International charged that ‘there is little domestic space for even basic transparency and accountability’ in Egypt’s business environment. By 2023, Egypt’s Corruption Perceptions Index was still roughly the same as in 2012.
Courts
On the eve of the 2011 revolution, conservative elements controlled the Judges Club and the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), sidelining reformists. Established in 1939, the social club evolved into a de facto syndicate articulating the judiciary’s institutional and political interests. The SCC, filled with reactionary pro-regime justices, became a self-sustaining entity isolated from both the political landscape and its own judicial community. This conservative current long sought closer ties with the executive in exchange for material benefits. Early on, a critical mass of the judiciary joined the counterrevolution. From Mubarak’s fall, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) sought to defuse the revolutionary movement by channelling grievances and reform demands to courts instead of streets, squares, and workplaces. Judges and prosecutors ensured regime officials, policemen, and the Mubaraks avoided accountability. They also collaborated with the military in drawing a political roadmap for a transition that would not fundamentally alter the system.
In doing so, SCAF worked with judges to disqualify presidential candidates such as Khairat al-Shater, radical Salafi cleric Hazem Abu Ismail, and Omar Suleiman, who were deemed threatening. Morsi’s candidacy was accepted as he was not taken as seriously as Shater. The judiciary dissolved the 2012 People’s Assembly, the first parliament elected without systemic fraud since 1952. The justices spearheaded counterrevolutionary sections of the opposition against Morsi after November 2012 and became a central component of the political alliance orchestrating the coup.
Following the coup, the judiciary worked hand in hand with the repressive apparatus, helping to architect the new military regime and ensure its survival. They dissolved the elected Shura Council (Upper House), revived old colonial laws that stifled collective action, enacted new laws that imposed draconian restrictions on the right to protest and freedom of assembly, prosecuted thousands of Islamist and secular activists without the minimum standards for a fair trial, and acquitted policemen and regime officials on trial. Judges systematically ignored police abuse complaints from defendants, and happily issued harsh verdicts based on confessions extracted under torture. Local rights activists have described the courts’ political use of capital punishment following the coup as ‘unprecedented’.
Such expansion also went on to include ‘criminal’, not just political trials. Between the start of the 2011 revolution and the 3 July 2013 coup, the courts recommended 152 preliminary death sentences, and the state carried out one execution. The period between 3 July 2013 and 23 September 2018, according to the London-based Reprieve, saw Egyptian courts recommend, in both political and criminal trials, at least 2,443 preliminary death sentences, and the state executed at least 144. Another tally by Reuters, published in mid-2019, showed at least 179 executions were carried out from 2014 to May 2019, compared with 10 in the previous six years. The same report revealed at least thirty-three civilians were executed following military tribunals since 2015, compared to zero from 2008 to 2014. In 2021, Egyptian courts issued at least 356 death sentences, the highest worldwide, according to Amnesty International. By hanging at least eighty-three people in the same year, Egypt came third, after China and Iran, in the number of carried-out executions. Human Rights Watch called in vain on the Egyptian state to stop the ‘execution frenzy’.
Such frenzy was enabled by the batch of new laws and amendments greenlighted by Sisi. While this process was set in motion immediately after the coup, it gained unprecedented momentum following the assassination of Hisham Barakat, the public prosecutor, in June 2015. Barakat had played an essential role in enabling the crackdown against Morsi’s supporters and anti-coup protesters. Attending his funeral, Sisi thundered with anger that ‘the hand of swift justice is shackled by the laws. We will not wait. We will amend the laws to enable us to achieve justice as quickly as possible.’ In the following August, Sisi signed the new counterterrorism bill, which included fifteen capital crimes. In total, under Egyptian laws, more than a hundred crimes are punishable by death.
For their part, the judges did not need either much convincing or bullying by the executive authorities to escalate repression in the courtrooms and legislation chambers. While Sisi applied the usual carrot-and-stick approach to control the judiciary, his task was relatively easy due to ideology. The judges – including even those who had fought for reforms and a higher degree of autonomy from the executive branch of the state under Mubarak – were essentially a faction of the elite at the end of the day, which tried to expand its power and reform the state machine from within. The nature of their profession and its function mean judges are not revolutionary. They could lobby for reforms under autocratic rule. However, faced with a revolution potentially disruptive to the entire system, they could quickly become a conservative force, opting for stagnation.
Nothing could sum up the judges’ elitist views more than the Minister of Justice’s statement to a TV show host in 2015 that ‘the son of a cleaning worker cannot be a judge. The judge must be brought up in a suitable social environment for this work.’ The judges, whether reformist or conservative, perceived themselves as the ‘guardians of social order’. And this social order was threatened by the revolution. Hence, after the coup, the judicial branch’s ideological transformation into a conservative and staunchly pro-regime force has only accelerated, as justices and prosecutors teamed up with the repressive apparatus to save the state from ‘chaos’.
Such an alliance has been further enabled, at least ideologically, by the fact that many judges are already former police officers and prosecutors. Already since the late 1990s, activist lawyers had been complaining about bawlasat al-qaḍāʾ, the ‘constabularisation of the judiciary’, due to the increasing presence of former police (but very rarely military) officers in the judicial branch. Many prosecutors are also former MOI or Homeland Security (HS) officers or related to Sisi and other senior government officials. In 2016, Sisi appointed his brother, Ahmad, a veteran judge at the Court of Cassation, to lead an influential unit in the Central Bank of Egypt tasked with fighting money laundering and terror financing. He introduced legal amendments later in 2022 to allow Ahmad to stay in his post indefinitely, even after reaching retirement age. Sisi also appointed Ahmad’s daughter, Hager, to the Administrative Prosecution Authority in 2014.
Before 2011, some state institutions, such as the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) and the Ministry of Justice, regulated the work of the judiciary and tried to bring it under the regime’s executive control. Among the repressive apparatus institutions, it was the SS that primarily handled the judicial branch. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, the Military Intelligence (MI) was managing the justices and prosecutors, yet gradually, since around 2016, HS has made a comeback. The GIS and ACA have been playing a role, since at least 2019, in vetting young applicants for judicial positions to ‘assess their political leanings and their loyalty to the state’.
Yet, betting solely on the ideological loyalty of the judges and prosecutors was not enough. Sisi embarked on a series of measures to ensure the courts are streamlined. Sisi ensured – with Adly Mansour’s help – that his judicial allies were placed in key positions. Only a day after the government officially declared the Muslim Brothers (MB) a ‘terrorist organisation’, the Ministry of Justice created eight specialised chambers within the criminal courts, dubbed ‘terrorism circuits’, and presided over by twenty-four judges that would convene inside two MOI institutions. The judges were handpicked among the most conservative, pro-state, and fanatically anti-revolution. Further legal amendments were introduced in April 2017 to limit the defendant’s ability to appeal the draconian verdicts handed down or get a retrial.
In the same month, Sisi declared a state of emergency following two suicide bombings that targeted churches in Tanta and Alexandria. This meant the return of the Emergency State Security Courts, whose judges are appointed by the president, who solely has the power to appeal their verdicts. A few months later, the prime minister decreed that all crimes related to laws on protest, assembly, labour disputes, commodities market pricing, places of worship, firearms, and terrorism were to fall under the jurisdiction of these exceptional courts. In October 2021, Sisi officially declared the end of the state of emergency. Rights lawyers and activists, however, described the move as cosmetic to deflect international criticism of the regime’s record on civil liberties. They pointed out also that the exceptional powers, granted to the repressive apparatus, have already been enshrined in a growing arsenal of authoritarian laws, and systematised in the performance of the judiciary and prosecutors.
Sisi generously rewarded his loyalists. He allowed the judicial branch to continue enjoying the prerogatives they already had and bestowed upon them more political and material privileges if they remained in line. In the 2014 Constitution, the judicial institutions were given financial autonomy, and their budgets (after parliamentary approval) were to be included only in the state budget as a single figure. In other words, the public is denied the right to know the details of the judicial branch’s spending, a preferential treatment that was reserved in the past for the repressive apparatus. The parliament is also obliged to consult with the judicial branch over any legislation that affects the latter.
The ban on seconding judges for non-judicial part-time jobs, which had existed in the 2012 Constitution, was removed in the 2014 Constitution to allow more income-generation opportunities for the judges. Prosecutors and judges were also exempted from wage caps introduced by Sisi for state officials in 2014. In the following years, Sisi has regularly showered them with material incentives. He also allowed the pervasive family nepotism and patronage, which had turned the judicial branch into an almost exclusive caste closed to outsiders, to continue. Some judges were also awarded executive posts on retirement in the Ministry of Justice and elsewhere in the civil service. From July 2013 to July 2020, roughly 4 per cent of senior government appointments (cabinet ministers and governors) went to retired judicial branch officials.
