Bar Association Chairman Hamdi Khalifa comes under fire from lawyers, reports Mohamed Abdel-Baky It was a week of protests and sit-ins for Egyptian lawyers as the Bar Association Chairman Hamdi Khalifa proposed controversial amendments to the legal profession law and submitted them to the People assembly. With the support of three National Democratic MPs, including Omar Haridi, who is a member of the Bar Association council, Khalifa has proposed changes to 10 articles in the 2008 law, the most controversial of which seek to change the way the syndicate's chairman and council are elected. The first amendment proposed by Khalifa attempts to change qualifications required by any candidate for the chairman's post. Current regulations require candidates to have been in legal practice for 20 years continuously in a private law firm, effectively preventing government lawyers from running for the post. The second amendment seeks to increase the quorum for calling a general assembly meeting to dissolve the syndicate board from 500 to 5,000 members. Khalifa argues that while 500 members was sufficient during the 1980s when the syndicate numbered 25,000 members "now there are over 500,000". "This dispute is pointless... The proposals are all beneficial to lawyers," said Khalifa. "The law that required 500 lawyers to call for a general assembly was issued in 1983, when the number of registered lawyers was 40,000, out of which just 25,000 were in practice. Today, the figure is more than 500,000. It has grown 20-fold." Sources close to Khalifa told Al-Ahram Weekly that increasing the general assembly quorum was not the problem. More contentious is the fact that the article proposed by Khalifa requires that the 5,000 member should be drawn from branches in at least 10 governorates, and that each branch must submit at least 100 signatures. Khalifa justifies these conditions as "necessary procedures for the stability of any freely elected council", adding that it was unfair for 500 lawyers, mainly from Cairo, to be able to determine the future of the syndicate. Opposition against Khalifa within the syndicate is led by former chairman Sameh Ashour, who describes Khalifa and Haridi's move as a "plan to take the syndicate under NDP control". The proposed amendments, he says, have not yet been seen, let alone reviewed, by any members of the syndicate board or the general assembly, "clear evidence", he insists, "that Khalifa and the NDP are seeking to kidnap the syndicate". Lawyers like Montasser El-Zayat who opposes the amendments, claim Khalifa has proposed the changes only as a way of retaining his position in the face of growing numbers of lawyers who want to oust him and the current council. Khalifa, he says, is using the amendments as a political tactic to distract the opposition he is facing within the syndicate. El-Zayat says he is not against increasing the number of members needed to call for a general assembly. The proposals provoked a war of words within the People's Assembly, with opposition and NDP MPs exchanging accusations. The debate ended when People's Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour decided to defer further discussion of the amendments to the next parliamentary session, i.e. after October's parliamentary election. "The constitution guarantees professional syndicates based on democratic values without any interference from any authority," Sorour said. Sorour requested that the People's Assembly Legislative Committee halt all hearings on the amendments until further notice. Meanwhile, hundreds of lawyers decided to organise an open sit-in at the syndicate's Downtown Cairo headquarters in an attempt to force Khalifa and Haridi to withdraw their proposals from parliament. The protesters refused to allow the chairman to enter the syndicate building. "These amendments' goal is to ensure the ruling party's candidates win the chairman's post in the future," said Ahmed Helmi, a member of the Defend the Bar Association Independence Movement. Helmi argues that under Khalifa the deficit in the syndicate's budget has reached LE29 million. "It is a lie that we want to let the government or the NDP to interfere in the syndicate's internal affairs," said Haridi. Haridi insists the changes focus on three main areas: increasing the financial resources of the syndicate; providing lawyers with greater legal protection from arrest, and seeking to engender greater stability as the council goes about its work.
