Maat Center has finished this week with a special program during 2006 to train 60 lawyers to handle the legal procedures of the detention issues, in which lawyers from Alexandria, Fayoum, Cairo and El Giza had participated.
The training , which continued for three days for each team, informed the lawyers of the provisions of procedures and punishments' laws and the international charters for human rights which Egypt has signed to be part of its internal legislation. They are also given a wide background about the Extraordinary law and the stages of its application in the modern history of Egypt, especially the period that follows the assassination of the ex-president Anwar El Sadat , as from this time right up to the present day the Emergency Law has not been removed.
The lecturers discussed with the trainee lawyers the situation in the Egyptian jails, the judicial reports regarding them and the varied reports on the number of the detainees in Egypt, their identity and residence. They also discussed the role of the lawyers, the holders of freedoms profession, in defending the victims of the Emergency Law and its ongoing enforcement and the ways of coordinating between the judicial and political activists and the Mass Media to make the catastrophe of detention and its outcomes their primary concern.
A number of the trainee lawyers who were trained by a group of human rights activists , declared their joining to the voluntary defence bodies in the detention issues , among of which is the Egyptian Network To Defend The Detainees , with Maat Center as its coordinator. In addition, the trainees hail what they have acquired during the training course of information and experience in the legal handling of detention issues.
Soon, the Center will renew its activity in other Egyptian governorates, through similar courses that will be held to train other lawyers to handle the same issues, especially in the Upper Egypt which lacks the care of many of the judicial organizations as Maat Center has observed. Also the Center puts a comprehensive plan that covers all the Egyptian governorates with the training courses for the lawyers in the framework of the Center's interest to spread and increase the lawyer's legal and judicial culture, especially which concerns the freedoms issues and rights of citizenship.
Maat for juridical and constitutional studies