Last October, Rania Kamal, a novelist, engaged a lawyer to complete the proceedings of an “accumulated maintenance” lawsuit, which she was forced to file after her ex-husband refused to implement a ruling issued by the Family Court to pay spousal maintenance and child maintenance.
This is a lawsuit filed before the Family Court by a wife who holds a final maintenance ruling against a husband who refuses to pay despite his ability to pay the amount ruled, and it is based on (Article 76) bis of the Law Regulating Certain Litigation Conditions and Procedures in Personal Status Matters, which allows the party in whose favour the ruling was issued to request the imprisonment of the maintenance debtor if the court establishes his ability to pay and his refusal to comply.
Rania had come to know this lawyer after appearing on a well-known women’s programme, in which she recounted her problem with her husband’s refusal to pay maintenance. She then received a call from him, during which he told her that he had watched the episode and knew the husband, and “he asserted that he had documents and contracts for plots of land that would support her legal position so that he would not be able to evade it before the court”. She agreed to engage him for her case, placing her full trust in him.
Several months later, last April, she was surprised to find that he had not delivered the writ of execution in the case to the bailiff so that the husband could be notified, although the delivery date had been last November, after the ruling was issued, and despite his assurances that he had submitted it and served notice on the opposing party so that the payment procedures could begin, while Rania remained waiting for any news in her case throughout this period, in vain.
Rania explains to Zawia3 that she discovered this when she went to the court to collect part of the accumulated maintenance, which had reached a total of EGP 86,000 at the time, based on the information she had received from the lawyer before she revoked his power of attorney, that the husband had been notified and had paid an instalment of it.
After numerous inquiries, a court employee informed her that the lawyer had submitted incomplete papers and had not registered them according to the established legal procedure. When she confronted him, she was shocked by his refusal to hand her the writ of execution, making it conditional on doubling his fees, even though she “covered the costs of the cases, including transport and administrative fees, and I have proof of the money transfers to his number, while I had agreed with him that he would receive 15% of the maintenance after it was collected”.
Rania decided to file a police report against him at the Shibin El-Qanater police station, but she backed down because the branch syndicate intervened to settle matters amicably. However, she “was surprised that the head of the lawyers’ syndicate asked her to sign a promissory note worth 15,000 in fees for the lawyer, while he had delayed the disbursement of her son’s maintenance, caused her harm and betrayed her trust”, as she described it. She therefore refused to sign and stipulated that an agreement contract be drawn up guaranteeing her right to have the writ of execution returned, in exchange for which she would pay only the agreed 15%, no more, while the lawyer demanded 30 percent, after the maintenance was collected, which caused the agreement to fail.
Zawia3 contacted the branch syndicate to obtain an official response regarding what was stated in the complaint, but we were unable to obtain a comment.
Material Harm… and Starting from Scratch
Rania describes what she went through as “shocking and harsh”, and says that instead of nearing the end of the road, she went back to square one, after she was forced to file a lawsuit to withdraw the writ of execution so that she could notify the husband and demand that he pay the accumulated maintenance. What makes matters worse is that her child suffers from a thyroid condition and needs periodic follow-up with examinations and tests, in addition to nursery expenses, alongside the household’s needs for housing, food and other things.
She recounts that throughout the past period her father, despite his retirement, has borne full responsibility for the two of them, and that she was also forced to sell her gold to contribute to living expenses alongside her father until she recovers her rights.
Rania is not the only one. Despite the absence of official statistics tracking the volume of complaints, legal and rights organisations confirm that the phenomenon has expanded recently. Gawaher El-Taher, director of the Access to Justice programme at the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, says the organisation receives repeated complaints in this regard from women who have lost cases or seen them stalled because of deliberate negligence by lawyers or collusion in favour of their husbands, in exchange for abandoning the defence, “through the husband paying a sum of money to the lawyer to withhold a certain document or for forgery”.
She explains to Zawia3 that they discover this negligence through the grounds of the ruling or the litigation procedures, as it becomes clear that the lawyer did not submit the required documents from the start of the case and deliberately concealed them, whether in lawsuits for increased maintenance or others, adding: “When we review the ruling and find no increase in maintenance, we know that the salary details, or the documents in general, were not properly submitted to the court”, because the judge states the reasons for issuing a ruling of rejection: “This is where I know that the lawyer did not do his job as he should.”
Rana Mohamed, a 35-year-old resident of Giza, faced another shocking incident and was unable to obtain an increase in her young child’s maintenance; after she revoked one lawyer’s power of attorney, she was not spared by the one who came after him.
She tells Zawia3: “In 2023 I engaged a lawyer to file for an increase in maintenance, and after a while he contacted me and informed me that I had been awarded an increase of EGP 2,000. Then we lost contact because I had an accident, and when I called him later, he told me that I had lost the case. I asked him why, since the first-instance ruling had granted the increase. He lied to me, and his excuse was that the assistant lawyer had given him wrong information, which left her astonished, asking how this could happen when every case has its own barcode for checking its details”.
Shortly afterwards, Rana discovered that the main reason for losing the case was that the lawyer had submitted the husband’s same 2019 wage details in 2023 so that she would not obtain the increase, explaining that “a lawsuit for increased maintenance is rejected only if the same wage is presented”.
This was revealed by the director of the company where her ex-husband works, after she decided not to engage a lawyer again and to pursue the judge’s requests herself in order to prove the real income. He told her that the income he received was not the one submitted to the court that year, but rather double, confirming that he “was receiving a much higher salary than the one recorded”.
Before that, Rana spent two years unable to provide for her child, who was born in 2018, because of the lawyer she had met through a friend to file a lawsuit for spousal and child maintenance after her baby arrived. She found herself stuck in a spiral of waiting, believing that the delay was due to the length of the judicial procedures, until she was shocked to learn that the lawyer had filed the case in 2019, that is, a year after her request, without telling her, which affected her and her child at a time when she had no job or monthly income: “I used to contact him every month to find out the date of the maintenance ruling, and ask him to hurry up.”
Nor did he stop there. Rana adds to Zawia3 that he “received the writs of execution for the maintenance rulings, refused to hand them over to her, and demanded double the fees”, while she learned from his assistant “that he works in a profession other than law, which is legally incompatible with the rules of the profession.
In 2023, Nadia Ali, a pseudonym, aged 42 and living in Sharqia, was surprised by an order evicting her from the shop that she and her sisters had inherited from their father, because of a legal dispute between her father’s heirs from among his brothers. She later discovered that the lawyer she had engaged to handle the case had not attended the hearings and had not submitted sufficient papers to guarantee her right, which caused it to be lost.
Failing to inform the client of hearing dates or developments in the case is considered a breach of the lawyer’s professional duties set out in Articles 63 and 78 of Legal Profession Law No. 17 of 1983, which oblige him to keep his client informed of the stages of the case, the rulings issued in it and the deadlines for appealing them.
Procedural Problems for Which Women Pay the Price
For her part, lawyer Heba Adel, chair of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Women Lawyers Foundation, says there is a problem in the course of procedures that is reflected in women’s fates, pointing to the law’s continued use of ineffective enforcement tools and the primitive methods of investigation in maintenance cases in particular, which opens the door to legal manipulation and the commission of forgery crimes.
She adds to Zawia3 that there are solutions to limit any manipulation, proposing the introduction of a legal procedure that would allow specific criteria to be set for investigating income, along with activating automatic direct deduction from the husband’s income and activating periodic increases according to changes in his salary over the years, in addition to activating the legal provision on setting temporary maintenance until the lawsuits are decided.
Heba believes that such solutions could help improve the situation and close the door to procedural manipulation, adding that treating income investigation as a burden of proof on the parties to the case, and giving them the opportunity to contact employers, receive the investigation report and deliver it to the court, opens the door to some people exploiting these wide loopholes in the law.
She points out that, according to the reports of the foundation’s Legal Support Unit, the rate at which female lawyers exploit these legal loopholes is much lower than that of male lawyers, stressing that this is why many women prefer to turn to female lawyers, particularly in personal status and violence cases, because they feel safer.
Heba explains that the law gives the opposing party the right to challenge the documents presented to the court at any stage of the case, in which case the court obliges the other party to submit the original document, and if it suspects forgery in the information, or material forgery, the court takes the procedures of a forgery challenge and then refers the documents for technical examination to verify their integrity. She notes that incidents and violations committed by lawyers have two paths of legal pursuit: the first is disciplinary, through the Lawyers Syndicate, in the event of a breach of the rules, conduct and ethics of the legal profession, and the second, if the act constitutes a criminal offence, is reporting and accountability under the Penal Code.
The law grants litigants the right to challenge documents submitted at any stage of the case as forged, through a report deposited with the court registry, in accordance with Article 49 of Law No. 25 of 1968.
Lawyer Entessar El-Saeed, chair of the board of trustees of the Cairo Foundation for Development and Law, stresses that women have the right to obtain copies of all documents relating to their cases to protect them from any legal manipulation or potential disputes, explaining that this includes keeping a copy of the power of attorney and a copy of the case file, as well as obtaining the court case number for follow-up, and explaining that the lawyer is supposed to hand the client the original writ of execution that he received, especially since it is issued only once.
Submitting forged income documents or salary details to the court constitutes the crime of forging official documents and using them with knowledge that they are forged, offences punishable by the Penal Code with aggravated imprisonment under Articles 206 and 214 of Law No. 58 of 1937. Recently, the Assiut Criminal Court sentenced a number of women to three years in prison in the case known in the media as the “Assiut girls”, after they were convicted of forging their father’s salary details and using them before the Family Court to increase the amount of maintenance awarded.
Concealing papers is a crime punishable by aggravated imprisonment under Articles 112 and 113 of the Penal Code, which provide that any public official who embezzles money, papers or other items found in his possession by virtue of his position shall be punished with aggravated imprisonment, while under Article 113 any public official who unlawfully seizes money or papers belonging to one of the bodies specified in Article 119, or facilitates this for another person in any way, shall be punished with aggravated imprisonment.
Article 89 of the same law provides that the lawyer, upon the termination of his power of attorney for any reason, must provide his client with a statement of whatever has been paid or collected arising from the case or the work entrusted to him in connection with it, return to the client all the papers and documents the client handed to him unless they have been deposited, and provide him with copies of the memoranda and notifications he received in his name. The client can also claim civil compensation from the lawyer for the damage resulting from his deliberate errors.
Amira El-Banna, a criminal lawyer, believes that the failure of some lawyers to perform their professional duty may often be slackness in favour of the opposing party, explaining to Zawia3 that some lawyers take bribes, particularly in maintenance cases, in exchange for being lax in the search to prove the real income, or any other property that may benefit the course of the case. She notes that she has been exposed to this herself, as her client’s opponent offered her a sum of money not to conduct her investigations into the wage he receives from his work abroad and his ownership of numerous properties and cars.
She stresses that these incidents contradict the text of Article 63 of the Legal Profession Law, which obliges the lawyer to defend the interests entrusted to him adequately and to exert his utmost effort and care in doing so, and not to provide any assistance or advice to the opposing party in any form.
Permitting the Withholding of Documents
On the other hand, lawyers consider the withholding of papers a prevailing custom within the profession, regarding it as a guarantee for collecting their financial dues should clients evade paying them. The danger of the problem is compounded by the endorsement of Article 90 of Law No. 17 of 1983 and its amendments, which grants the lawyer the right to retain his client’s documents if there is a written fee contract, or to retain the sums collected on the client’s account equivalent to the value of the agreed fees that have not been paid to him.
If there is no written fee agreement, the lawyer may extract copies of those papers and documents that can serve as a basis for his claim, at his client’s expense, and is obliged to return the originals of these papers once he has received from his client the costs of extracting them, so that the withholding of papers and documents does not result in missing any specified deadline for taking a legal action, failure to observe which would result in the forfeiture of the right.
The Supreme Constitutional Court rejected the challenge to the constitutionality of this article in 2023, in Case No. 73 of Judicial Year 35, filed by a lawyer in 2013 after he entered into a legal dispute with one of his clients because he had seized documents belonging to that client, extracted an executory copy of a ruling issued in the latter’s favour and retained it, without a written fee agreement, harming his client’s interests. The court had sentenced the lawyer in absentia to six months in May 2011, and the article is still on the Lawyers Syndicate’s page.
A lawyer admitted before the Court of Cassation, who preferred not to be named, says that withholding documents, refusing to hand them over, or submitting inaccurate documents and data to the court, in a way that affects the course of cases and the rights of clients, is a crime punishable by law and constitutes a grave professional error, even when there are disputes over fees, because it results in major material and moral harm.
She explains that in this case the client has the right to file a report with the Public Prosecution over the withholding of her papers, and the prosecution will summon the lawyer for questioning immediately, even if she has no proof of his guilt, because he will have signed at the court, in his name and under a power of attorney number, for receiving these documents and executory rulings, so she can use that in the report, since he is the only one culpable: “because it is not his right to keep papers, so he is culpable”. She points to a problem in that most women rule out this step and instead file lawsuits to extract the executory rulings again, thereby wasting their time.
She points out that there is another path, which consists of filing a complaint with the branch syndicate in whose jurisdiction the incident occurred, which is referred to the disciplinary committee before being sent to the General Syndicate to investigate its substance.
She adds that if the incident is proven and the lawyer is found to have violated the rules of the profession, he may face disciplinary penalties extending to suspension from practising the profession for up to three years, as well as possible referral to criminal trial, according to her statement to Zawia3.
If the branch syndicate refuses to register the complaint or take action on it, as happened with Rania, the lawyer notes that the client has the right to file a complaint against the branch syndicate itself with the General Lawyers Syndicate.
Legally Empowering Women
For her part, Gawaher El-Taher explains that the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance tries to confront this problem from the start of contracting with lawyers, by following up on the cases and requiring the lawyers to submit regular reports with the latest updates on decisions issued, hearing dates and the receipt of rulings, in addition to reviewing the statement of claim, noting that the existence of other parties, besides the lawyer, to whom clients can turn guarantees their rights, especially if they complain that the lawyer has not attended or has given them incorrect information.
She believes that legally empowering women has become a necessity, and that this can only happen by constantly raising their awareness of their legal rights and how to obtain their demands, so that they do not find themselves exposed to blackmail and exploitation by others, noting that a proportion of women suffer from legal illiteracy because they receive wrong information from outside that may harm them.
For this reason, El-Taher explains that it is necessary for them to be familiar with all the information and the time each case takes: “If the case is struck off, she must know the reason, and the explanation for the issuance of a particular judicial ruling, in addition to the hearing dates, and whether or not it is important for her to attend them.”
For her part, Asmaa Dabees, a feminist activist and founder of the “Bint El-Nil” initiative, stresses the need to follow up on procedures with lawyers, always insisting on attending hearings even if they are unimportant.
She advises asking for clarification regarding updates and obtaining complete information and the course of the litigation, reasoning that “relationships should not be built on absolute trust”, especially given the recurring testimonies about lawyers taking fees while deluding women about the progress of their cases and giving them fake hearing dates, which prolongs the duration of the lawsuits, and stressing that the client is obliged to pay only the agreed fees, unless the number of cases increases.
In the same context, the cassation lawyer stresses the importance of concluding the fee agreement directly inside the lawyer’s office, with the sums he receives for handling the case documented in a contract signed by both parties. She also recommends drawing up a receipt or a paper, signed by the lawyer, stating that he has received the case documents from his client, so as to guarantee the documentation of the papers submitted to him and their use within the case file.
Absence of Oversight
Asked whether there is any oversight of lawyers’ performance inside the courts, the cassation lawyer revealed that there is no actual oversight either of lawyers’ performance or of the fees due to each lawyer.
In this context, she spoke about the draft Code of Conduct issued by the General Syndicate in 2023 to regulate the relationship between the lawyer and the client, saying that it remains suspended to this day.
The Lawyers Syndicate had announced the draft Code of Professional Conduct for Lawyers after reviewing the provisions of the Constitution in Articles 77, 98 and 198 and the Legal Profession Law in Articles 62 et seq., after the council of the General Syndicate agreed to issue it, in order to present it to the General Assembly.
The Code came in application of the second paragraph of Article 62 of Legal Profession Law No. 17 of 1983, which was added by Law No. 147 of 2019 amending certain provisions of the Legal Profession Law.
She noted that its most important pillars include barring dealings between the lawyer and the client’s opponent until the work between him and his original client has ended, so that he may not accept cases from the opponent, in order to preserve his client’s secrets; otherwise he would be violating the rules of the profession and would be referred for discipline. She added that it addresses the importance of the lawyer’s appearance, conduct and, in particular, professional performance. A review of the Code shows that it aims to impose a set of controls and rules that the lawyer must observe while dealing with his clients.
In the absence of official statistics and effective oversight mechanisms over lawyers’ performance, some women find themselves facing a double legal battle: the first to obtain their rights before the courts, and the second to confront the errors or abuses of those who are supposed to represent the first line of defence of these rights. Between the withholding of documents, delays in taking procedures and the submission of inaccurate data, the cost of litigation for women multiplies, materially and psychologically, which highlights the need to strengthen professional oversight, adopt the suspended code of conduct, and legally empower clients to follow up on their cases and know their procedural rights, so as to ensure that the journey in search of justice does not turn into a new path of abuses.
