Position Paper 

An entire year has elapsed since the beginning of public discussions of the draft new Criminal Procedure Law, which emerged in August 2024, until the House of Representatives voted to approve it in April 2025 without any genuine amendments to its content; followed by the president’s refusal to sign the law in September 2025. Throughout this year; lawyers, human rights advocates, legal scholars, members of civil society organisations, professional syndicates, Members of Parliament (MPs), and UN experts have publicly rejected the law and have extensively detailed the reasons for rejecting the draft law’s premise and provisions. There was a collective demand for postponement of the bill promulgation process and broadening the base of community participation in the amendment of refinement of the text, through hearing sessions that involve all stakeholders. Nonetheless, all of those efforts fell on deaf ears. The  House of Representatives was committed to an unnecessarily accelerated process and seemingly to the wording of every single provision in the draft including deeply flawed ones.

While the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)—among a broad coalition of Egyptian and international human rights organisations—welcomes the President’s decision, announced on September 21, 2025, to refuse to sign the law and return it to the House of Representatives “to examine objections” to a number of its articles, it stresses that Parliament has a rare opportunity to reconsider the law’s overall philosophy, not just  to introduce textual amendments here and there to the some of the provisions of some of the articles. This is absolutely essential in order to create a genuine social and political consensus around this law, a law that is viewed by many as a complementary to the Constitution and a fundamental building block of  the criminal justice sector.

Beyond the detailed legal analyses that aim to highlight the various flaws and inherent risks in the draft law, there is a consensus that its main problem—even if it contained some positive improvement in some of its provisions—is greater than just a legally flawed article or one that lacks appropriate safeguards. The problem lies in the very governing philosophy of the law itself. This philosophy can be summarised as a political and security desire to cement, legalise, and eternalise the existing conditions and practices, including the systematic violations and structural defects that have ravaged Egypt’s criminal justice system in recent years and infringed upon the rights of litigants, especially those accused of a criminal offence.

The Criminal Procedure Law is not only concerned with regulating the legal and procedural frameworks within which judges and law enforcement institutions operate, but also with safeguarding the rights of litigants and those accused of a criminal offence or exposed to legal accountability. In fact, most of the law’s articles—as is the case with any criminal procedure law—revolve around regulating the handling and rights ofa citizen accused of a crime whose conviction has not yet been proven. It is logical, then, that the legislator’s primary concern when undertaking the task of drafting this law should be how to enhance the guarantees of a fair trial and protect citizens’ rights at all stages of the proceedings. However, the draft law, as approved by Parliament in April 2025, intentionally did the exact opposite: it significantly reduced fair trial guarantees. It multiplied the powers of the investigating authorities and law enforcement officials at the expense of the accused and their legal defence, completely disregarding the principle of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty—a principle that has practically disappeared in the new law.

The only acceptable reason—if there is one—that necessitates such an undertaking: replacing the entire Criminal Procedure Law with a completely novel legal framework would be that  the new law strives to change existing conditions for the better, and to modernise the Egyptian justice sector in a manner befitting its longstanding legacy. A law that would strive to meet and surpass the minimum international standards for the right to a fair trial and best practices in the administration  of justice. It should not be about crystallising the deterioration in the practices of justice institutions, as is evident in the text of the bill’s provisions.. When it was enacted 75 years ago, the Criminal Procedure Law of 1950, and before the amendments introduced after 1952, was viewed as progressive legislation that was comparable to, and in some aspects superior to and more progressive than its counterparts in other countries. Egyptians have the right to accept no less in a new law promulgated nearly a century after the original was enacted. Therefore, the Egyptian Constitution, issued in 2014, must serve as the foundation from which the draft law originates, adding further layers of constitutional protections and legal safeguards based on successive evolutionary developments in criminal law jurisprudence and international conventions and standards.

From this viewpoint, we present these four governing principles that must be at the heart of the philosophy governing any  fundamental change to the system of criminal rules and procedures, moving away from the limited and uninspiring legislative goal of simply codifying existing conditions or merely patching up what is already there:

1. Separation of Powers and Enhanced Mutual Oversight Among Judicial Institutions

The existing procedural system, as it was envisioned in the original philosophy of the 1950 law, was meant to create a “procedural pyramid” where each judicial authority was responsible for a specific set of procedures, subject to oversight and review by a higher judicial authority, and allowing for oversight and review by different judicial jurisdictions. This structure completely changed with numerous amendments introduced to the existing law over the decades. Then came the new draft bill which seems intent on cementing this situation and further expanding the powers granted to the Public Prosecution without establishing any mechanisms for oversight and accountability on its work. Restoring the principle of separation of powers and enhancing institutional oversight at the heart of the process of drafting the new legislation may not necessarily achieve a return to the original legal philosophy that established the mandate of independent investigating judges and an indictment chamber separate from the investigating authority (now defunct). Still, it could aim to restrict the powers of the Public Prosecution and affirm the supervision of district judges over any procedure that affects the inherent rights of the citizen without exception (such as those contained in Article 116 of the draft law regarding communications surveillance). Furthermore, it would entail abolishing any provision that grants the powers of the district judge and  Court of Appeal judges to the Prosecution in State Security cases, for example.

2. Equality of Arms Between the Prosecution and the Defendants

Due to years of legislative and executive practice that favour state authorities and that have become very creative in facilitating their work at the expense of citizens’ rights, the moral compass of criminal laws in Egypt has been fundamentally altered. We have reached the apogee of this situation where state institutions and executive bodies, as outlined in the extant Criminal Procedure Code, are provided with broad protections, facilities, and powers while curtailing and restricting the rights of the accused and their legal defence. The new draft then proposed adding more powers to the Public Prosecution and reducing avenues for appeal and redress against its decisions. 

By adopting and the principle of equality of arms, absent from the philosophy of the existing legislation, which ensures that the accused and their defence in criminal cases obtain the greatest possible extent of rights equal to those of the prosecuting authority (the Public Prosecution in our case); we would have to revise and rewrite all articles that multiply the powers of the Public Prosecution without oversight or accountability. This governing principle does not permit the delegation of inherently judicial matters to  police officers, nor does it allow for the arbitrary concealment of witnesses and witness identities, for example. Instead, it strengthens restrictions on what should be a very rare exception that infringes upon the accused’s right to self-defence. The same principle explicitly guarantees the accused’s right to constant access to their lawyer at any time, in complete privacy and without interference from executive authority. It also ensures that litigation and investigation take place in neutral locations, rather than inside prisons and detention facilities, which would entail comprehensive amendments, for instance, to the articles contained in the chapter regulating remote litigation (virtual trials).

3. Presumption of Innocence and the Right to Trial Within a Reasonable Timeframe

The right to trial within a reasonable timeframe as a starting point would necessitate a complete review of all the draft law’s provisions regulating arrest,summons orders, detention and its renewal, and other precautionary measures tied to criminal investigations. It stems from the recognition that a person accused of a criminal offence is innocent until proven guilty. This is a basic principle of modern criminal law - presumption of innocence - is stipulated in Article 96 of the Constitution but one would be pressed hard to find its influence in the new draft bill where it is almost entirely absent.. 

Acknowledging the citizen’s right to a trial within a reasonable timeframe requires viewing every precautionary measure or preservative action as a freedom-restricting measure that, by definition, infringes upon the fundamental, inherent rights of a citizen who has not yet been convicted or indicted. Furthermore, non-custodial precautionary measures are equivalent to pre-trial detention procedures in that they all restrict the freedom of an innocent citizen. Accordingly, all such procedures must be specified, their misuse prevented, and all of them, without exception, subjected to a single (combined) time limit. The same principle when enshrined in the law would ensure that these restrictions are continually subjected to tests of proportionality  and necessity, and that all means of appeal against them are provided. Ultimately, this principle requires even more creative legislative proposals that aim for restricting the total time period for an open criminal investigation - an idea that was discussed in the deliberations that preceded the publication of the draft bill - even when investigating authorities do not resort to any measures that limit the fundamental freedoms of the accused.

4. Restoring the Original Balance Between the Rule and the Exception

• While this would be our main goal in new legislative initiatives, the current draft law sets out to do the exact opposite of this philosophy. Applying this governing principle would ensure that no new law would be allowed to include   phrases like “as the case may be” without attempting to specify the relevant cases, even if not exhaustively. New laws would also not contain words that empty stipulated time limits of any meaning, such as permitting extensions “for a similar period or periods of time,” or making the enjoyment of fundamental rights by the accused and their legal defence subject to the “interests of the investigation.” This consequently mandates a complete redrafting of all the new articles introduced in the proposed new law that govern remote litigation and virtual hearings/trials., Under this governing principle, the new text of the law would affirm that this legal anomaly—in which the accused is not allowed to speak directly to their judge, confront the plaintiff or their adversary, examine witnesses and evidence presented against them, and present their complaints and potential physical injuries for the court to review—is an exceptional situation. And like every exception, should only be resorted to for specific, necessary reasons, and should be subjected to proportionality and necessity tests. This would prevent virtual hearings from becoming the norm for all cases - as is currently the case in detention renewal procedures - and for all forms of adjudication, which is a possibility inherent in the wording of the new draft law.