Missed Opportunity..The Politics of Police Reform in Egypt and Tunisia Shaima al-Sabbagh

CARNEGIE – YEZID SAYIGH

Police forces and security agencies genuinely accountable to democratically elected civilian authorities have not emerged in either Egypt or Tunisia four years after popular uprisings forced the countries’ longtime leaders from power. Ministries of interior remain black boxes with opaque decisionmaking processes, governed by officer networks that have resisted meaningful reform, financial transparency, and political oversight. Until governments reform their security sectors, rather than appease them, the culture of police impunity will deepen and democratic transition will remain impossible in Egypt and at risk in Tunisia.

Missing the Opportunity for Reform

• The uprisings generated two significant opportunities to initiate security sector reform: in the immediate aftermath, while public support was widely mobilized and the sectors were too weak to resist, and after the formation of new interim governments following general elections, which gave political leaders the legitimacy and mandate to prioritize reform.
   
• Initial measures were not sustained by sufficient unity of purpose, effective political coalition building and social consensus, or coherent reform policies. 
   
• Amid deep political polarization, Islamist parties elected to office were accused by secular rivals of using the reform agenda to control security sectors and “Islamize” them.
   
• Appeasing the security sectors and assuring their political neutrality became watchwords of successive interim governments. 
   
• Delays in pursuing serious reform allowed security sectors to retrench and use the growing threat of political violence and terrorism to resist efforts to make them transparent and accountable. 

Lessons From Egypt and Tunisia

Neutrality is key. Legacies of distrust and political polarization in transitional countries make it essential for actors to avoid competing to control the security sector. Neutral ministers of interior should be appointed and empowered. 

Security sector reform is both a top-down and a bottom-up process. Institutional design, policymaking, and ensuring compliance are top-down processes, but political parties, civil society, and media must be engaged to build broad consensus, provide transparency, and generate complementing pressure on security sectors to comply.

Engagement with security sectors is necessary for reform. Because transitional structures are fragile and new political actors lack relevant policy and legislative experience and technical expertise, the security sector must be involved in identifying priorities and designing processes. 

Benchmarks and oversight are needed. Offering security sectors a real stake—through improving professional capabilities, pay and service conditions, and recruitment and promotion policies—must be tied to the sectors’ improvement in performance and compliance with legal, political, and financial oversight. 

Governments must not cede on critical issues. Compromises are unavoidable, but governments should hold the line when it comes to ending security sector impunity, setting policy and budgets, and making or ratifying senior command appointments.

Moments of Opportunity 

The Arab Spring was the outcome of deep political, social, and economic grievances. Its signature motif, however, was the outpouring of anger against police forces widely perceived as guilty of systematic human rights abuses and endemic corruption. In both Egypt and Tunisia, thousands of police stations and vehicles were attacked, and police cohesion and morale collapsed amid mass revulsion. But although the “securocratic” states that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had constructed over previous decades were weakened, security sectors genuinely accountable to democratically elected civilian authorities have yet to emerge in either country, a full four years later. 

Reform of the security sector—the various police, paramilitary, and internal security forces and agencies reporting to the Ministry of Interior—involves several interrelated tasks. The overall aim is to improve the professional capacity and competence of the security sector to perform its duties in compliance with democratic governance, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. As Egypt and Tunisia came out of a long period of repressive, authoritarian rule, transitional justice was also an important requisite for democratization, not least for the victims of police violence during the uprisings that triggered the ousters of Mubarak and Ben Ali along with their closest cronies and associates. 

Democratic transition cannot be completed without reforming abusive security sectors and transforming their relationships to power. But the odds of achieving root-and-branch reform of the security sectors in Egypt and Tunisia were low from the outset. Even a successful process would have been incremental and protracted. 

Still, the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia generated two significant moments of opportunity to initiate meaningful security sector reform. The first came in the immediate wake of the uprisings in the two countries, when public support was the most mobilized and compensated for the fragility and questionable legitimacy of the initial interim governments. The second moment of opportunity came with the election of representative assemblies and new transitional governments in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011–2012, which enjoyed firmer legitimacy than their predecessors and were motivated to respond to popular expectations. 

The opportunities were real. Support for fundamental changes in how the security sectors operated was widespread among the general publics. Members of the security sectors were demoralized by the collapse of their ability to intimidate citizens, and they were disoriented by the sudden loss of the presidents-for-life who had built up the sectors’ political primacy and budgets. They were too weak to resist a concerted push for change. Reform-minded officers were, moreover, emboldened to openly advocate a new ethos of professionalism, accountability, and public service. And crucially, the armed forces, which had long resented the security sectors’ ascendancies, sought to restore their preeminence in the case of Egypt and to assert a new balance in the case of Tunisia following the downfalls of Mubarak and Ben Ali, in which they had played key parts, and to forge ties with the new political actors that now competed for center stage. 

The uprisings had provided a powerful initial impulse to embark on reform across the board, but this was not sustained by sufficient unity of purpose, effective political coalition building and social consensus, or coherent policies for change. And that lack of purposeful and sustained effort ensured that the opportunities were missed. 

The inability to resolve or mitigate the bitter political and ideological contests that dogged the transitions in Egypt and Tunisia after 2011 made it difficult to resume effective law enforcement or upgrade the security sector’s professional competence and operational capacity, let alone enforce respect for the rule of law, human rights, and governance. Instead, a police state is emerging in Egypt, and political surveillance is making a comeback in Tunisia. What was politically possible in the early days of the uprisings is far harder now—if not completely off the table.

Political Dynamics: Defeating the Purpose in Egypt and Tunisia

Security sector reform was a central challenge in all four countries that underwent transitions following the Arab Spring—Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen^* —but several factors put Egypt and Tunisia in a separate category. In contrast to their Libyan and Yemeni counterparts, the Egyptian and Tunisian security sectors had clear institutional boundaries and chains of command that the uprisings did not break, enabling them to avoid complete collapse and to regain internal cohesion relatively quickly. And although the security sectors were initially cast adrift by the losses of informal patronage networks that had tied them to the former ruling parties—the National Democratic Party in Egypt and the Constitutional Democratic Rally in Tunisia—this eventually left them with greater autonomy from the new authorities. 

As importantly, post-uprising political struggles in Egypt and Tunisia did not center on the security sectors in the ultimately destructive way they did in Libya and Yemen. Nor did they call into question the nature and existence of the central states, which maintained routine bureaucratic functions during the transitions, and to which society continued to look for law enforcement. Furthermore, new legislative and constituent assemblies and interim presidents untainted by association with the former regimes came to office through competitive general elections, granting them genuine legitimacy.

To shore up their fragile legitimacy, the interim governments in Egypt and Tunisia needed to restore law and order, which meant asserting meaningful control over the security sectors. And all of the factors that set Egypt and Tunisia apart from other Arab Spring countries should have made it easier for them to launch top-down reform processes in key domains. 

In both states, the broad goals of security sector reform—improving the professional capacity and competence of the sector as well as ensuring that transitional justice was done—could have been translated into concrete measures. These included reviewing laws governing the police and forming official restructuring teams within ministries of interior (as Yemen did).  Upgrades of training and forensic capabilities as well as pay and service conditions could have been undertaken as part of a package that set benchmarks for police performance and compliance with the law and human rights. Concrete measures also included reviewing recruitment policies, vetting personnel accused of past abuses, and amending constitutions to confirm that the police forces were civilian agencies committed to public service under the oversight of the executive, legislature, and judiciary. Full transparency was essential, so much, if not all, of the reform process should have unfolded under the oversight of committees combining ministers of interior, heads of security sector change teams, the judiciary and prosecution service, and representatives of governing parties and civil society. 

Some of these measures were at least initiated, which shows they could have been done. But few were completed, and many were not attempted at all.

What is more, despite being weakened, the security sectors’ authoritarian legacy, institutional autonomy, and sense of injury and resentment following the Arab Spring made them potentially dangerous opponents. Conversely, the new governments lacked experience governing or managing change in general, and even less in the security sector. 

Appeasing the security sectors and assuring their political neutrality, rather than reforming them, became the watchword of successive interim governments. Delays in pursuing serious reform and the enactment of half-hearted measures allowed the security sectors to retrench, and the opportunities passed. 

Essentially, the manner in which transitional political dynamics evolved defeated the purpose in Egypt and Tunisia with regard to the security sector. 

Interregnum politics: The interim governments formed in the wake of the uprisings were composed predominantly of officials from the Mubarak and Ben Ali eras. These were unelected, temporary bodies that lacked the popular mandate or political legitimacy needed to initiate major structural reforms in any sector, including security. They were inherently conservative, preferring stability and continuity to unsettling revolutionary change. Their initial reforms consisted almost exclusively of largely cosmetic changes: purging or reassigning relatively small numbers of officers and renaming political security agencies.

Political polarization: Subsequent interim governments had considerably greater legitimacy thanks to being elected to office, but they found it difficult to pursue security sector reform amid the dynamics of deepening political polarization. This was especially true for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its Islamist counterpart in Tunisia, Ennahdha, both of which had previously been the principal targets of the former securocratic states and had become the leading parties in government. Their attempts to replace senior officials in the interior ministries or other state institutions, which was normal for any incoming administration in a democratic context, prompted accusations from secular rivals—with whom ancien régime loyalists now aligned—and revolutionary activists that they sought istihwadh (partisan takeover) and Islamization. And when the Brotherhood and Ennahdha responded to the unwillingness of the police to resume their duties fully by proposing alternative or complementary means of tackling growing lawlessness and crime, this generated alarmist charges that they sought to build parallel security structures and Islamic morality police.

Baby versus the bathwater: The tendency of transitional political actors to view security sector reform within a secular-Islamist divide suppressed the highly contentious but critically important debate over how far and fast to take the process. For some, continuing the revolution, as they might put it, required purging all feloul (former regime officials). But many others emphasized the need to retain professionally trained personnel and existing structures in order to preserve the skills and experience needed for effective law enforcement; this group included those who genuinely sought democratic governance of the security sector, as well as those who used the argument to block meaningful change. Amid these dynamics, the interim governments of Egypt and Tunisia were right not to lose the security sector baby, but they ultimately they failed to throw out the former regime bathwater, so to speak.

Counterterrorism and the revival of impunity: Failure to design and launch reform agendas including some or all of the concrete measures described above allowed the potential readiness within the police to accept change to dissipate, resulting in growing resentfulness among members of the security sector and their reversion to an adversarial perception of citizens. Any hope of reviving a security sector reform agenda was superseded by the rise of counterterrorism agendas in response to the threat of homegrown and cross-border jihadist violence. As the security sectors regrouped, they used the entirely legitimate argument that they should not be politicized, to resist any effort by government to make them transparent and accountable. These dynamics allowed the culture of impunity within the security sector to reassert itself.  

The Egyptian Security Sector: From Collapse to Revenge

These trends and dynamics are graphically demonstrated in Egypt, which presents the most egregious example of the consequences of failing to undertake far-reaching security sector reform. One author described “the task of crafting a state that works for its people” as “the basic challenge raised by the Egyptian revolution,” but this task equally required the transformation of the mammoth sector under the command of the Ministry of Interior.¹  It was estimated conservatively to have 1 million personnel on its payroll at the time of the 2011 uprising, and more commonly 1.5–1.7 million, including up to 850,000 policemen and Interior Ministry staff, 30,000–100,000 State Security Investigations Service agents, up to 450,000 conscripts in the paramilitary Central Security Force, and 300,000–400,000 paid informers.² 

Instead of reforming the security sector, Egypt has lurched toward the reconstitution of the Mubarak-era police state. Failure to pursue comprehensive reform contributed directly to the ouster in July 2013 of then president Mohamed Morsi, who had been the first civilian to assume the presidency through genuinely competitive elections, and to a full-fledged authoritarian reassertion. 

A police state harsher in its repression and more hegemonic politically in comparison to the Mubarak era has been reconstituting itself under military suzerainty. Increasingly draconian laws, hypernationalist discourse, and the expanding role of the security sector and armed forces in all aspects of civilian life herald an even more authoritarian political order based on broader societal acceptance of the repressive practices of the state’s coercive apparatus. 

Egypt’s Interregnum

This was not inevitable. The 2011 uprising generated substantive proposals for security sector reform. Most notable was the National Initiative to Rebuild the Police Force—A Police for the Egyptian People, a civil society platform involving retired or dismissed officers that put forward a broad reform framework. Other pro-reform officers formed the General Coalition of Police Officers, the General Coalition of Police Non-Commissioned Officers and Privates, Officers but Honorable, and similar groupings without official authorization. Among their priorities, as one officer explained, were a “reduction in work hours, paperwork and administrative tasks to encourage the police to provide proper security, as well as salary reforms and training programs to reduce brutality.”³  

However, civil society initiatives were weakened by the inability to build effective joint platforms with reformist police associations. Activists who had long viewed the police as an enemy did not understand their institutional culture, or else sought radical changes without building real partnerships. And grassroots initiatives could only go so far without strong and sustained top-down political support. 

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed Mubarak’s powers on February 11, was reluctant to tackle the mammoth task of restructuring the huge Ministry of Interior or its bloated agencies. The SCAF’s approach was moreover shaped by a fundamentally conservative outlook and instinctive distrust of upheaval. It studiously avoided substantive restructuring, let alone actual reform. 

Instead, the SCAF sought to gain the Interior Ministry as a political ally and win back the security sector’s rank and file. It made gestures toward the reform-hungry public and revolutionary activists by dismissing 670 senior internal security officers—mostly in the notorious State Security Investigations Service—and changing the latter agency’s name to the Homeland Security Sector. But its next measure was to award the police a 300 percent pay increase in the 2012 budget, without linking this to new performance benchmarks or expectations regarding conduct. In parallel, the Ministry of Interior defused a wave of protests among police superintendents (umana al-shurtah), who play a critical role in basic law enforcement in Egypt, by granting them the possibility of promotion to a new, honorary noncommissioned rank of “delegates” (mandoubin) or “honorary officers.” 

Similarly, when the Interior Ministry issued the first-ever police code of conduct in October 2011, the document lacked clear obligations and penalties. Rather than protect citizens from abuse, it assured police impunity, while using terminology that reiterated the force’s military character. The ministry refused to register or recognize any of the police associations that had appeared. Instead, it sought to split or co-opt them: it started disciplinary proceedings against the Officers but Honorable group, while accepting to deal informally with the General Coalition of Police Officers and the General Coalition of Police Non-Commissioned Officers and Privates, which were allowed to register as clubs in 2013.⁴ 

The Muslim Brotherhood Backpedals

The importance of political leadership—and of its absence—was reconfirmed following the election in June 2012 of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi as president. Coming to office through Egypt’s first genuinely free and competitive presidential election since the establishment of the republic in 1952, he had a credible popular mandate for reform and high public expectations to meet. The opportunity was there for reform. 

Earlier in the year, senior Brotherhood official Amr Darrag had identified security sector reform as the top priority for the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s parliamentary vehicle, which had won nearly half the seats in the People’s Assembly. Darrag argued that security sector reform “is probably the most important issue that we would like to tackle because it’s the key for stability and that’s key for any economic development or further reform.”⁵  

This perspective echoed that of civil society advocates who argued that “the number-one priority is security sector reform, because that is the backbone of the abusive, authoritarian apparatus. And if it stays in place you can forget about elections, you can forget about civil society, you can forget about a free press—if it remains intact, it is the one body that could bring down the progress of the revolution.”⁶ The Freedom and Justice Party moreover endorsed a “political isolation” law that was approved by the SCAF in April 2012, which barred Mubarak and the top-ranking officials and National Democratic Party leaders during the last decade of his rule from running for public office or exercising certain political rights. 

Encouraged, several human rights NGOs and activists proposed a “draft law on Restructuring and Cleansing the Police Department” to the parliamentary committee on defense and national security in May 2012. But with this, the importance of strong and unified political leadership on the issue became abundantly clear.

When Parliament amended the police authority law (number 109 of 1971) in June, this fell far short of any reform agenda. The revised law ended the president’s nominal status as head of the Higher Police Council, which assists the minister of interior in policymaking and planning and in police personnel affairs, but it did not assert parliamentary or other civilian oversight. It transferred judicial authority over the police from army-run military courts to a disciplinary board within the Interior Ministry, but it did not establish complaints mechanisms and other basic rights of security sector personnel. The remaining changes pertained to improving pay scales and pensions for personnel. A ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court on June 14 to dissolve the assembly precluded any further parliamentary debate. 

Morsi, who was sworn in as president on June 30, similarly muted talk of security sector reform. The Interior Ministry sent another 454 senior officers into retirement in July, but the government of Hisham Qandil, who was appointed prime minister that month, did not even order a review of the security sector, not to speak of a full reform plan. In October the Justice Ministry proposed draft legislation imposing harsher punishments for the use of torture by the police and other abuses, but as with all other attempts since 2011 to bring the criminal code into compliance with international standards, this was not issued by the bodies that had the power to do so in the absence of Parliament: the presidency, cabinet, and Shura Council. And when the drafting committee dominated by the Brotherhood submitted a new constitution for approval by public referendum in December, it contained nothing that materially changed the powers of the security sector, let alone reformed it. 

Walking a Tightrope Between Appeasement and Partisan Takeover 

The apparent shelving of security sector reform by the Morsi administration revealed a paradox. On one hand, revolutionary activists and human rights groups who had often accused the Muslim Brotherhood of concluding a secret deal with the SCAF to preserve its military prerogatives and interests in return for a peaceful handover of power now claimed a similar understanding had been reached with the Interior Ministry as well.⁷ They believed the security sector had simply shifted its loyalty from Mubarak to its new political masters. Statements by Morsi extolling the police, opposing “purges,” and, most galling for activists, claiming that the police “were at the heart of the 25 January 2011 [uprising]” gave credence to these views.⁸  

Certainly, a modus vivendi came into effect once Morsi assumed office, allowing him to negotiate key cabinet positions with the military and security establishment and to establish a fact-finding commission into the killing of protesters by state agencies in 2011–2012.⁹ This concluded in March 2013 that the police were responsible for killing nearly 900 protesters and that commanders had authorized the use of deadly force with Mubarak’s knowledge. But the Morsi administration quietly shelved the report after a court headed by a Mubarak-era judge acquitted the six most senior commanders of the charges.¹⁰ This was the last significant security reform initiative by his administration.

On the other hand, whenever the Morsi administration made new appointments in the Interior Ministry, secular and liberal sections of the Egyptian opposition—and not just revolutionary activists—accused it of trying to infiltrate the state apparatus with Muslim Brotherhood members or sympathizers, a process that came to be known as ikhwanization. But while there was some truth to the charge that Morsi sought to ikhwanize the Mubarak-era judiciary, which had issued a series of hostile decisions including the dissolution of the recently elected parliament, the security sector was not affected. 

Quite the contrary, the Morsi administration pointedly left the Ministry of Interior and related security agencies entirely in the hands of Mubarak-era loyalists, a decision criticized by revolutionary activists. Its first choice as interior minister was Ahmed Gamal el-Din, a retired general regarded by some as a hardline member of the anti-reform faction in the ministry. In October, Morsi appointed as the new director of the National Security Agency an officer who had previously been responsible for monitoring civil society organizations, political parties, and media and for “countering” the Muslim Brotherhood.¹¹  

Most ironically, Major General Mohamed Ibrahim, who became minister of interior in January 2013, was accused by some of working to “Islamize” the ministry.¹² It was on his watch that, for example, religiously observant policemen were finally allowed, after a long struggle, to grow their beards in contravention of standing orders. But in fact Ibrahim was to play a key role in removing Morsi from power six months later, and in leading the exceptionally harsh crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood that followed. 

Parallel Security

The policy of appeasement had already proved a failure during Morsi’s year in office. Even some secular opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood acknowledged that “Morsi is resisted within the Ministry of Interior and the state apparatus.”¹³ This posed a serious problem, as the security sector continued its de facto abdication of responsibility for public law and order, even as crime rates rose. The government needed to do something to restore stability.

In the first half of 2012 and then during Morsi’s tenure, senior security officials (including some of the governors of Egypt’s 27 provinces, all appointed by Mubarak or the SCAF) reproduced the Mubarak-era practice of hiring baltagiya—thugs operating outside the law, believed to number between 100,000 and 500,000—to enforce state authority.¹⁴ The police often advised citizens to hire baltagiya to take the law into their own hands; in some urban slums, the police relinquished their functions entirely to criminal gangs that ran protection rackets and trafficking and prostitution networks, and formed their own militias.¹⁵ 

Faced with an uncooperative Ministry of Interior, the Morsi administration sought other means of addressing the deterioration of law and order. In October 2012 the new justice minister awarded judicial police powers of arrest to the country’s main watchdog agency, the Administrative Control Authority, and in March 2013 the attorney general awarded similar powers to citizens. The Justice Ministry was also reported in the same period to be preparing to authorize private security companies to bear arms and make arrests.¹⁶ This followed the introduction of a bill legalizing armed private security companies to protect private property by the Morsi administration, adopting a proposal originally made in November 2011.¹⁷ This was resisted by the police and human rights activists, who, in the words of one researcher, “feared it would legitimize and expand private militias” armed with weapons smuggled from neighboring Libya.¹⁸ 

The Morsi administration also sought to delegate some responsibility for law and order to unofficial bodies, building on the success of local communities in filling the vacuum left by the police in some neighborhoods in the immediate aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow. In mid-March 2013, the Freedom and Justice Party proposed legalizing popular committees as an ancillary police apparatus attached to the presidency.¹⁹ Ironically, this idea was taken up by the successor regime that came to power after the overthrow of Morsi. In October 2014 the state council drafted a law establishing community police units that would hire men and women between eighteen and twenty-two years old and grant them, according to one analyst, the power of arrest to aid the police in “facing crime, enhancing a sense of security among citizens and . . . creating a culture of security.”²⁰  

But during Morsi’s tenure these various moves provoked immediate accusations from police and military sources that the Muslim Brotherhood sought to “destroy the police” and was opening the door to “private militias.”²¹ This moreover played out against the backdrop of an increasingly polarized and alarmist public debate about the role of unlicensed Islamist Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, styled after Saudi Arabia’s morality police (mutawiin). The first committees had appeared in December 2011; Morsi’s spokespersons denied their existence after he assumed the presidency, but yet another morality police group announced itself in early March 2013.²² The militant al-Jamaa al-Islamiya added to the charged atmosphere in February 2013 by announcing that it was forming so-called self-defense squads to confront vandals, thugs, and anti-Islamist anarchists, and in March it revealed that it would seek legislative endorsement from the Shura Council.²³  

The Fallacy of Appeasement—Back to Square One

By this time, then defense minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and other members of the SCAF had abandoned hope of coexisting with the Muslim Brotherhood in government. The Interior Ministry had long promoted this view in private, arguing, as one officer put it, that the Brotherhood was “a threat to national security and had to go.”²⁴ For its critics, conversely, the Interior Ministry had never relinquished its “octopus-like growth, extending into all reaches of the state apparatus with the aim of control,” in the words of one former senior police officer.²⁵ The security sector faced functional, structural, administrative, and legal challenges that made it necessary, in this view, to “rebuild, rather than restructure” it.²⁶  

Some senior Interior Ministry officials seemed to agree. In October 2011, then assistant minister of interior Major General Abdul-Latif al-Bidiny suggested that the ministry’s entire structure needed to be replaced, though he also argued that this could only happen “after the political and security spheres [have] stabilized.”²⁷ This reference to stabilization was not unreasonable, as a pro-reform author noted at the time: “transition to democracy might indeed require [security] institutions to be strengthened, not dismantled.”²⁸ But objections from within the Ministry of Interior to wholesale restructuring obscured resistance to bringing the security sector under meaningful political oversight. In May 2012 the ministry rejected a modification to its law of establishment that would have placed it under the scrutiny of a new watchdog agency established by Parliament. Justifying this, the head of its legal department claimed there was no need to monitor the ministry after the revolution, as the “individual” excesses that had occurred previously were not part of a systematic policy, and the security sector could now safely monitor itself.²⁹  

The Interior Ministry’s senior echelon was not only unreconstructed, it was unrepentant. In seeking an accommodation with it, the Morsi administration missed the opportunity to build on reformist sentiment among the rank and file. Police who started a series of wildcat strikes in October 2011 demanded the dismissal of senior police commanders accused of corruption, equal access to police hospitals for all ranks (commissioned and noncommissioned alike), and an end to the jurisdiction of the military justice system over policemen. The General Coalition of Police Officers—which claimed 5,000 members by January 2012 but was refused registration as a formal police union by the Interior Ministry—sought to bring down the retirement age to sixty, introduce minimum and maximum wages, and establish an eight-hour work day.³⁰  

These were legitimate, indeed critical demands for any genuine reform process. However, neither of the two interim governments appointed by the SCAF nor the later Qandil government took action, with the partial exception of introducing some pay rises. By March 2013, pro-reform police coalitions were complaining that the Morsi administration was ignoring their proposals “to improve accountability, rules of promotion and retention, and training,” as one author wrote.³¹ It lacked any “genuine political will to restructure the Interior Ministry,” a leading coalition member argued, “and this has led to our return to square one.”³²  

Shaima al-Sabbagh

This statement was published at the time of accusing a police officer, by Egypt’s state prosecutor,  to trial for allegedly shooting to death a leftist female protester during a peaceful rally in central Cairo.

The police officer, who was not named by the prosecution on Tuesday, will stand trial before a criminal court.

The death of Shaima al-Sabbagh, which was partly captured by a photographer, prompted President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to publicly demand that the perpetrator be brought to justice.

She was shot to death as police dispersed a small march of leftists on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the January 25 uprising.

The marchers had been carrying a wreath to a monument commemorating the deaths of protesters during the revolt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Hisham Barakat, the chief prosecutor, said in a statement that the investigation revealed Sabbagh died from birdshot fired towards her and other protesters by an officer ordered to disperse the protest. The ammunition can be lethal at close quarters.

Barakat charged the police officer with involuntary manslaughter, punishable by up to seven years. No trial date has been set.