 This is the second panel. The Politics of Rule of Law. I'm Lynn Welshman from the Law School. I'd like to thank Nimmer for doing me the honour of inviting me to chair and for doing all the work and assembling this wonderful panel. We haven't got...we're a bit late but that's not our fault so we're going to catch up. I'm not going to read out the bios but you have the conference papers which have the rather stunning CVs of my panellists here so I'll leave those to you to have a look at. Each panel is going to have 15 minutes rather than 20 so we can get to questions and discussions quicker at the end and also because I'm anticipating that perhaps we'll have some questions and discussions that go to the first panel and how these two match up. So we want to live a little bit more time for discussion at the end perhaps. Is this on? Can you all hear me? Also because I think I've noticed with some people they tend to talk slower as Friday sort of wears on. Doesn't apply to me. I'll hesitate to tell you. Doesn't apply to me at all. So I thought we're going to have 15 minutes and then more time for people to ask slower questions after the end of that. We'll aim to finish it just after seven so our first panellist is Heba Morayef who's a human rights defender, former director of Human Rights Watch in Egypt and before that we met her in Amnesty I think. And she is going to be speaking on the meanings of the rule of law in Egypt. Heba. We're very welcome. Glad to have you with us. Thanks and I'll try very hard to stick to my 15 minutes. So I want to talk a little bit about how about of course there are lots of different meanings of rule of law, but what rule of law, what notions of rule of law have meant to us in the human rights community in Egypt. And I have the perspective very much of a practitioner. I've been out of academia for 10 years, not very good on theory, but I did want to talk. But what I do think is interesting is is how the value of using notions of rule of law has shifted so drastically over the last four years. And the long term implications of this for human rights work in Egypt, which ultimately rests on selling law, selling law, selling rights that are rooted in Egyptian law. Of course there's nothing new with having competing narratives of rule of law and legitimacy. Under the Mubarak, the Egyptian MFA was very skilled at talking about the rights that existed in the 71 Constitution and at countering whatever documentation and narratives that were coming out of the human rights community at the time. But for us under the Mubarak, in the Mubarak, doing human rights work and calling for respect for the rule of law meant calling for accountability for security forces, countering the impunity that the regime enjoyed in terms of those abuses and in terms of corruption. It also meant an end to administrative detention and the exceptional court system. And it also meant an end to government disregard of some of the progressive decisions that came out of the administrative courts or even some of the rights that existed in the Constitution or in different laws. And it also meant calling for judicial independence. And you see that throughout the last decade of the Mubarak era in particular. For me what 2011 meant most was an opportunity to try to shift the balance of power between the security services and the judiciary. So a lot of the things, a lot of the calls that you would hear throughout the uprising in early 2011 were related to accountability to the rights of victims, were related to justice. We want to be a country of law as opposed to sort of the barbaric arbitrary nature of all that came before. These were powerful ideas during the uprising. So I'm not claiming that this was the essence of the uprising, but there were possibly large sections of the list of people that had had on that list were phrasing some of the demands in legal terms. Fast forward to the summer of 2014 when the government and the state and the private media justify the killing of over the thousand people in one month by saying that this was saving the state against the barbaric onslaught of Islamism. This is a moment where, and is able to get away with it internationally and domestically for now. On the one hand that summer the government, I mean the new regime felt that they had a legitimacy gap. So they shifted very very quickly into a PR campaign that was aimed of course specifically at the United States because of the cool legislation implications for military aid. But more generally a PR campaign to say that this was not a coup. And to make these not a coup arguments, many of which were very very convoluted and self contradictory, the government would frame things in terms of respect for rule of law. So, and I think that actually the longer term implications of a lot of these measures that they took and I want to go through a few of them have been incredibly destructive for the very notion of the rule of law in Egypt longer term. So for example the regime, CC doesn't, CC takes centre stage I would argue on July 27th, July 26th when he calls for the people to give him a mandate to fight terrorism. Before that you have the notion of a coalition, of a June 30th coalition. But one could also argue that CC takes centre stage on June 1st when he first gives Morsi a 48 hour ultimatum. But CC doesn't take power formally, instead he installs a judge, the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court. And I think here again the longer term implications of this judge having sat over this transition and having held legislative authority and having issued a number of laws many of which will probably turn out to be, will probably eventually be ruled unconstitutional. One already has the election law, I mean the current crisis that we're in of the elections having been postponed is precisely because the election law that he issued was found to be unconstitutional. The longer term implications of that, I mean this is an act which will also have longer term implications. So on the mobarak calling for respect for the rule of law meant wanting to end emergency state security courts. Because these were courts created by the emergency law and these were the ones notorious for sentencing dissidents, notorious for failing to uphold due process guarantees and for always ignoring torture and for sentencing people based on confessions extracted under torture. Mansur, so at the time, sorry I keep jumping around a little bit, but at the time on the mobarak we would use the judiciary for strategic litigation, we would turn to the judiciary to fight procedural arguments to get people out of the tension. If people had been sentenced by a prosecutor order there was a good chance that by arguing on use process grounds, on procedural grounds you could actually get a few releases here and there. So in a sense our goal was to move people from out of the administrative detention regime into the regular court system because the judiciary was kind of the hope of oversight over that administrative detention regime set up which was solely controlled by the Ministry of Interior. Now that administrative detention regime was created by the emergency law and this is why the call for an end to the state of emergency which is something you also heard during the uprising was so emotive. Now honestly if you ask most people what the emergency law was, how many provisions it had, what was bad about it, these are very technical questions that most people wouldn't really wouldn't be able to answer what the problem was, but it had somehow become representative of everything that mobarak's police state stood for. So this is why the state of emergency was eventually not renewed and then it was only renewed after the dispersal of the two sitins in August 2013. The interesting thing is is that at the point of when the state of emergency was declared which actually in terms of the definition, this would actually qualify factually as grounds for declaring a state of emergency at least for those first couple of weeks in terms of could qualify potentially for the declaration of a state of emergency. But the government and then oppose a curfew on the basis of that state of emergency. But interestingly they didn't activate the administrative detention provision within the emergency law which had been used on the mobarak to detain tens of thousands of people. The reason of course we were against administrative detention is that there's no judicial oversight, high potential for torture and very little chance of actual release. But the reason they didn't use the administrative detention is that the Supreme Constitutional Court had a few months earlier declared that provision unconstitutional. And I suppose it could have been due to the fact that Adley Mansour was president of that court and was now president of the country. So it might have been taking it one step too far to then completely ignore that ruling and go back to administrative detention. But more importantly the regime had actually learned that it didn't need administrative detention. They could throw everybody into pretrial detention and continue to renew pretrial detention again and again and again for over a year without charging people and they could get away with it. And so today the crisis that we're in in terms of detaining either opposition members or activists is in fact that it's the regular judiciary. It's no longer at the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Detention and it's no longer state security courts. It's the regular judiciary that is responsible for the detention of tens of thousands of people today. The highest number confirmed by the authorities was 22,000 but independent estimates by lawyers for this project, Wikisauram, have determined that 41,000 people are detained in pretrial detention. So this again has longer term implications because the judiciary which was, you know, never a full ally for us in the human rights community but at least a judiciary that had a mixed repute, let's say. Some judges who would sit there and sentence dissidents and as I said you know, census people based on confessions extracted on the torture but other judges who were either sometimes progressive in the administrative courts in particular in the council of state ruling on questions of state policy by the government but other times judges who really just wanted to apply procedure as it was. So we're conservative in their general leanings but every now and then would actually come up with a positive ruling. Now where we are today is a huge crisis for the judiciary because I, because it's clear that the judiciary as a whole has taken an ideological stance in support of the regime post-summer of 2013 and that even those judges who could have been potential allies for the human rights community, for those sections of the human rights community who are still operating as a dependent human rights defenders that say and who are still representing cases of Islamists because for me that's the main criteria for that distinction today. You don't have allies in the judiciary today, people who are willing to stick their heads up and at least make progressive rulings. And fear is a very operative factor. We also have, the regime has also chosen to shut down a political space by either enacting new laws like the protest law or referring to Mubarak error laws like the NGO law. So again in early 2011 a new protest law was one of the main demands that was floated around. Do you know what you're saying about this obsession with constitutionalism? One of my regrets or one of my lessons learned is that I wish there was more obsession with legislative reform as opposed to constitutional reform because in fact it's usually these laws, it's penal code provisions and laws like the protest law or the NGO law that have been the most effective tools for the regime in particular in the full blown counter-revolution that we've seen recently. So the production of these new laws again issued under Morsi's watch and in fact the way these laws have been implemented has allowed the regime and the pro-state media, which is basically all the media right now, both state and private, to keep this narrative alive while it's the law. Those kids want chaos, those protesters want chaos, we are upholding the law. And it's made even, you know, the most sympathetic of cases, somebody like Yora Salem, who's a human rights defender, a good friend of many of us who's been in prison since June of last year, usually those kinds of, I mean, to be very cynical about it, these are the kinds of cases that are much easier to get media attention and to get public sympathy for. Even cases like her can be justified by, well, she didn't respect the law. So you can produce or reproduce repressive laws because again in terms of this protest law all it did was incorporate criminal penalties of the existing laws on assembly, which actually date from the days of the British, it's 1914 and 1923 laws. So it was a reproduction of a Mubarak era law but used again to legitimise a crackdown on political space. In my final two minutes, the other two things I want to know, the one remaining big thing is impunity and accountability because I think the one difference you had about 2011 and the one reason that we saw the police, we saw law acting as a constraint upon the police throughout 2011, I would, a big picture and I'll tell you why, was because of the trials. So you had over, there's a lot of focus on the Mubarak trial because that's sort of the big policy trial with the senior ministers of interior. But I think far more interesting trials are actually the police station trials that were to place around the country. And so if you had 172 police officers put on trial in 38 different trials and in these cases the police would very often talk during and after those trials on television and the media about the insult of having been dragged through the courts. I mean that idea of being tried, being prosecuted for killing 846 protesters was a deeply traumatic event. And I would argue based on what we were documenting at the time acted as a check to a certain extent on their excesses. So fast forward to today where you have absolute impunity. You not only have the police being able to shoot unarmed women like Shem Eisebarl this last January and the one exception in fact to the general impunity that the police have enjoyed under CC for killing protesters is her case because a police officer has just been referred to trial. But other than that you have police officers now shooting ex-fiancés. You have them, they're using live ammunition at checkpoints. A police officer shot a patient chained to a hospital bed in January and then publicly justified it including the Ministry of Interior by saying that the patient had insulted him. So there's no pretence even now on the part of the Ministry of Interior to need to pretend that it's not using live ammunition or that they have a sense of new empowerment by the absolute impunity that they've enjoyed. Longer term concluding point is that I think we're in a moment of crisis as a human rights community that is even worse I would claim than the 1990s. And I say this having spoken to people, to some of the Egyptian human rights offenders who were working in the 1990s. So we haven't gone back to the late Mubarak era because in the late Mubarak era for the last ten years we could at least operate. And had some allies within the system who wanted the Gamal Mubarak crowd who cared about their image in the west and were acted as a moderating influence from the government or certain people within the judiciary who would cooperate on procedural grounds. But the regime really does seem to have won this round. And it puts us in a position of not being able to work in the way that we used to work on the Mubarak when thinking about how we use the law and who we turn to within the legal system to uphold more progressive interpretations of human rights. So I suppose without ending on two depressing notes, the two things I can deal with was on the one hand this is an opportunity to think about what useful lessons can be learned. And I think the biggest one is that when given an opportunity like the Johnny 2011 uprising, that opportunity, you have a very short space of time and you have to use it very strategically. And part of that I would say legislative reform very early on, don't assume that history is on your side and the history will remain on your side. And don't assume that the deeply embedded forces in the Egyptian state, I mean one can argue how much of a transition there was anyway in February 2011, but there was at least an opportunity. And I think the progressive forces who approached Johnny 2011 underestimated the challenges that they were up against. And I mean the final, final, final note is that, no, is that this round has been lost by the human rights community, but I still think that the effects of Johnny 2011 are unpredictable. And a state that's trying to reconstruct a state of the 1990s still doesn't quite know what it's dealing with. I have to end on a slightly optimistic. I was waiting for that. Thank you very much. Heba, our next speaker is Dr Adam Haniae from the Department of Development Studies at SAAS, who's going to talk about state building, economy and the rule of law mostly focused on Palestine this summer, right? Yes. OK, thank you. So, yeah, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today and it's great to be on the panel with guests. I do want to speak on something a little bit different from the cases of Tunisia in Egypt and that is looking specifically at the question of the Palestinian Authority and what we can learn about the relationship between state building, the rule of law and the political economy that has unfolded under the Palestinian Authority over the last few years. I know that the Palestinian case has not really been a major focus of the Arab uprisings, but I think it is a case that is very illuminating to turn to when we think about what might happen in other parts of the Arab world and that is because the case of the PA, the Palestinian Authority, has really been a major focus of institutional donor support and aid over the recent decade and I think we can see it very much as a laboratory, if you like, for some of these debates around state building. I think we can see the language that we notice in the Palestinian case replicated in the cases of Tunisia in Egypt in recent times. Now, there's a lot to the state formation debate and state building debate that I don't have time to deal with, but I just want to emphasise at the beginning two kind of key theoretical propositions that underlie the way this is understood in policy terms. The first is, and this I think is a key point, is that there has been an explicit linkage posited between democratisation or democracy promotion and market-led models of development. The creation of liberal democracies and market-based economies are said by donors, by actors involved in the process in Palestine and across the region to be mutually reinforcing processes. We can see this clearly in the way that it's framed by the IMF, the World Bank and other actors. We can also see it, I think, and this relates very much to the cases of Tunisia in Egypt in the international financial institution discussions around the Duval partnership, which was an institution set up in May 2011 following the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, which has promised $40 billion in loans and other aid towards what's called the Arab countries in transition. Very clearly in the Duval partnership, we can see this kind of market-led or neoliberal orientation attempting to roll out new loan agreements and assistance that are in essential continuity with past programs, emphasising, in other words, private sector-driven growth, fiscal austerity, particularly around subsidy and pension reform, and the liberalisation and deregulation of financial and labour markets. I think this is an important first point, this kind of neoliberal or market-based model of development that underlies the approach to state building in the region. The second is the claim that effective state building is causally related to more peaceful or less violent states. So drawing upon Kantian conceptions of representative democracy and the international relations between states, this so-called liberal perspective claims that if a state is governed along liberal democratic lines, then it will be less likely to go to war because of the inherent reluctance of the population to engage in military conflict. As one perceptive critic noted, you can basically understand this in the phrase, democracies do not go to war with one another. So, as I said, there's a lot more to kind of the state building approach, but I want to just turn now to look at what this means in the case of the Palestinian Authority. Because this approach, what I've outlined, very much governs how PA state building has emerged since particularly 2007. This is the kind of the key moment. And in 2007, the PA adopted something called the Palestinian Reform and Development Programme, the PRDP, or Palestinian Reform Development Plan actually, which covered from 2008 to 2010. Now what the PRDP did was set out the basic lines of development under the Palestinian Authority, particularly focusing on the West Bank. At this point there had been the split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This program, as I said, it went to 2010, but since then there have been other plans developed, the Palestine National Development Plan, the PNDP, which has continued basically to follow the same kind of models. So it's governed all aspects of Palestinian development and echoes very much other initiatives that we see coming from the quartet and the World Bank, as well as from things like the Kerry Initiative that we saw last year. So what did the PRDP say? It explicitly confirmed the neoliberal orientation of state building. It committed the PA to implement or undertake a series of fiscal reforms that aim to reduce public expenditure on public sector wages and employment. The overall goal was to reach, and this is a quote, a diversified and thriving free market economy led by a pioneering private sector in harmony with the Arab world and open to regional and global markets. That's a quote from the PRDP itself. External donor funding to the PA was based on the implementation of the PRDP. In fact, the flows of capital, the flows of aid to the PA were channeled through a World Bank Trust Fund, or World Bank Administered Trust Fund, headquartered in Washington. Constitutionally, I'm not a lawyer but I will say just one thing about the constitution, what this means, it has meant that neoliberalism has actually been enshrined in the Palestinian basic law. Article 21 of the Palestinian Basic Law explicitly states, and this is a quote, the Palestinian economic system shall be based on a free market economy. I don't know how widespread this kind of constitutional embedding of free market or neoliberal principles is, but I think the Palestinian Authority is a very clear example of how this twinning occurs. So, there's a lot that can be said about the PRDP. We can see it in terms of the development of industrial zones near Jenin and Jericho. We can see it in the explicit orientation towards private sector-led development in the housing and real estate markets, and particularly the development of mortgage markets and hence debt relations for Palestinians over the last decade essentially. So, the other side to the PA State Formation Program or State Building Program has been, of course, and this was very much a component of the PRDP, was the question of security. And what this meant was that the security budget received the largest portion of funding within the PA, going to training of new police forces and establishing prisons and new prisons. Now, in this manner, PA State Formation was largely conceived through building both the neoliberal capacity of state institutions and developing the monopoly of violence within the territories administered by the PA. And, of course, foreign aid, which underpinned the budget, was very much an enabling factor within this. So, what have been the consequences of this kind of state building model and how can we think about this in terms of other processes in the Arab world? Now, a lot of scholars and activists have commented on the way that this model of state building has acted essentially to incorporate Israeli settler colonialism into the way that the PA operates in the West Bank. It has led to an ineffective and collaborationist, in many respects, political orientation on behalf of the PA. But I think the other side that is often left out is that the PA State Building Model has primarily acted to support the growth of a handful of large Palestinian economic conglomerates that dominate almost every aspect of the domestic economy in the West Bank. We can see this in virtually all sectors of the economy. In housing, for example, where real estate development is controlled by just three private and state-owned firms that are closely connected to the Palestinian Authority. In banking, where 15 out of 17 of the banks that operate in the West Bank are also controlled by these same conglomerates. In telecommunications, in trade and retail sectors, and in the aforementioned development of industrial zones. So, this is one side of where state building has led in Palestine. The other side to this has been growing levels of inequality and fragmentation within Palestinian society, very much connected to the spread of debt relations I mentioned earlier. OK, I'm going to just move on though to say what does this tell us about how we understand state building and the rule of law. The first thing I think these trends point to is the importance of reconsidering the inherent relationship between economic processes and political and indeed legal forms. Too often I think we can see of these fears, the politics and economics as being separate. We treat them separately and I think we can see this in many of the contemporary debates today in the region where the focus has been on building liberal democracies or new constitutional models, but keeping in place the same types of economic policies that preceded 2011 and 2012. We can see this in the Duval partnership that I mentioned earlier. We can see it in the way that Western governments and institutions continue to orient towards these so-called transition states, i.e. there's a narrow focus on political issues encompassed in themes like governance, voice accountability, but the emphasis is on continuing the same kinds of neoliberal economic reforms. Liberalised markets in this approach seem to be apolitical and separate from the question of political power. I would argue though in contrast to this separation of the political and economic and agreeing with many other scholars on this point that we need to see these fears as fused. Political forms reflect and mediate economic power and this is why in the Arab world there's been such a close association between authoritarian forms of rule and neoliberalism. I must not forget that in 2008 the Mubarak regime was awarded the world's top reformer, economic reformer by the World Bank in 2008. So it was held up very much as a model for the rest of the region to follow. In other words, we need to understand the state as an institution that is never and cannot be neutral. Rather it should be understood as a form of appearance of the social relations that constitute society. As an institutional form of these social relations. Seen in this manner the separation between politics embodied in the state and a supposedly independent civil society encompassing the market is illusory even as a normative goal. Academic approaches that present the ideal of liberal democracy as the desired policy end supposedly guaranteeing the same rights and responsibilities for all civil society actors regardless of wealth, social status or accident of birth act to obscure the reality of social power that is fundamental and foundational to the ways that markets work. So the conclusion that I think we can draw from this is that this connection between the political and economic is particularly important to emphasise today as it points to the necessary linkage between the struggle to address socio-economic inequalities in places like Tunisia, Egypt and very much today in Palestine as well. This question of differences in socio-economic power and those efforts aimed at political reform. These things are bound up together. Questions of constitutional forms, electoral systems, political participation cannot be separated from these ongoing and deepening socio-economic inequalities. So we need to address these inequalities and I think attempt to reverse and question the kinds of market led development models that we saw in Palestine but also we see very much I think unfolding in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia today if we are going to see any kind of effective and real political change. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Our next panelist speaker is Dr Aferff Jebri. We're very happy to say doctor because me and Nadie were both on her committee so we'd like to say well that Aferff again. And a very good PhD it was too. She says this now before. Aferff is talking, so Aferff is now a lecturer at Roehampton and she's going to talk to us on, she's used the word revolution and we didn't have the morning session. I insist on it actually. Gendering the Arab revolutions, women's rights and the challenge of insecurity. Okay thank you very much Lynn and I might want to take you a little bit away from law and constitutions too but also in a related issue that is linked to what you have been actually the speakers of this conference have been talking about which is the issue of how that's compromised for instance constitution or how the constitution that serve interests of the states or how the chaos of the situation in Yemen or Libya has impacted upon lived realities of people and in particular I want to talk about the realities or how activists, whether human rights activists or political activists, how they do look or how they do perceive the current stage of the revolution and I call it current stage of the revolution because I don't think it has ended. It is still on. It is just one stage of so many stages that we are going through. So when speaking to so many of these activists actually what do you feel from them is that there is a sense of loss a sense of loss if I want just to personalize it for some of you as if you are MA students doing your dissertation or a PhD student doing your thesis or a scholar who is working an idea for years and trying to conceive it and when just he or she is so satisfied of this idea and putting it into a very strong, beautiful piece of writing he or she has to give the credit for someone else not just to give the credit but also this person or a group etc turn this piece of paper to something opposite to what you meant it to be turn it to something that is stranger to you, something alien to you so you are no more identified with your own work you don't feel it actually and you cannot defend it you look at it as something alien and this kind of loss actually because so many people when they looked at the revolution they looked at it although so many criticized revolutions that they do have only slogans but for so many people revolutions including mine including me revolutions meant maybe finally that we do have our own liberation project maybe it's coming through maybe it's the end of colonialism in the region maybe it's the end of all independence in the region so that's why the loss is great for those activists and for women even the loss is greater and doubled because in one part they have lost same as men their aspiration for this liberation project and in the other they lost their own aspiration for their own liberation project Tahrir y Square wasn't just or other squares in the region in Libya or Sana'a or Tunis were not just safe places they were places where women finally kind of realized themselves as part of humanity their essence as human not as half-minded, not women who need guardianship not women who need protection so that sort of sense of loss is greater for them because of that and I call it sense of loss because I don't want it to be fear because when you those people just two years or three years ago they didn't fear death, didn't fear killing they didn't fear being arrested or anything so for that for them actually this an ordinate drastic sense of loss for so many people and as I said for women in particular I wanted to discuss it and it's from the outset of the revolution that and in a way actually to restore power the regimes power there was a connection between low between ideological patriarchal ideology state mechanisms, political economy as it has been just discussed and so many other aspects that it tried to that form the whole system of executing women not just executing them but also creating material and ideological conditions to alienate them from the revolutions and creating conditions where they are strange and they are exposed to different forms of violence and here I will analyse how this happened through Karl Marx theory of alienation and I will take three aspects of it the first aspect is the alienation from the process of producing revolution the second is the alienation of the act of revolution of women itself and the third is the alienation from the product of the revolution and for the first aspect of alienation it has been manifested in the ways in which women from the beginning of the revolution where their state and their struggle was perceived or portrayed as something exceptional and as a state of exception it's not the norm women are not normally joining efforts and they are not normally in the street defending their rights so in this way and I'm sure you have all seen like headlines a telegraph or news New York Times or guardians of women finally are in the front lines women are shoulder to shoulder with men women are taking their rights and women are demanding and finally on this word actually so much emphasis on finally as women have never been part of the revolution and they have never been actually they are not the one who contributed in producing the revolution itself we all know that women's NGOs or women's movement in the region whether individual activists or whether women's organisation have continued to work under excessive harsh conditions under dictatorships in different countries whether in Syria, Iraq and Egypt so they have produced the revolution and this effort wasn't actually recognised in the ways in which their contribution in the revolution was perceived and trying to make them alien to this process of production the other thing is the exceptionalisation of that made particularly to a particular women from particular party, political party or even from particular class or particular power position that they are made the revolution they are the ones, the heroine ones the ones who take all of the words in each country there is only one identify woman or two maximum that everyone recognise that she is the one who made this revolution while other ordinary women the majority of women who were part of the revolution and who have fought as same as others or maybe created their own ways of resistance their revolution or their contribution in the revolution wasn't recognised last week I was in New York participating in the CSW conference which is the United Nations conference on women and I have presented a video for not sure if you have seen it but it's a video for an elderly woman who from Raqqa in Syria who challenged ISIS and who challenged ISIS by reading from the Quran and showing that how Islam is peaceful by reading these particular verses of Quran and the way she did that she silenced them by Quran and she actually was really amazing and shows us how women with specific knowledge of just Quran and some old traditional proverbs have the courage to face ISIS militants without any fear and actually the first question I was asked about this woman is how authentic is the video and that was really amazing and instead of looking at what she was doing and how she used her own knowledge and resisted Daesh we are in a position to say if that video was authentic or not and this is maybe because this ordinary woman has challenged the scholar who identified herself actually as a scholar and a human rights and American scholar and a human rights activist her ideology or her stereotypes of women in the region as passive victims that they do not stand for their own issues or maybe because the issue that there are some aspects of peace in Islam so in all of this you see that women is still we do have this orientalist understanding and stereotypical of images in the region as all passive and only we have two or three here when brave, active women who are doing all of the other work the other actually aspect of alienation which is the act of revolution itself which was denied to women and we see how the shift has happened like from the beginning women were active participants to just one month after Egyptian revolution or other revolutions where women were shown as passive victims of sexual violence of harassment of rape so this shift made that women are not more active political activists but they are more exposed to violence and harassment and this has too many actually purposes the first is to threaten other women to use as a weapon by states and non-state alike that threaten women and silence other and at the same time to produce another image of women rather than the one that the world have seen in the revolution the other image also you can see through the last elections in Egypt where we have seen women only as dancers of the election the first time I seen an old woman dancing in the election it was actually nice but then these videos started to be repeated to the extent that you see nothing about women in the election process but dancing and even in the press conference of announcing the results there were also women dancing not journalists, not politicians not observers of the elections but women's dancing last time I was in Egypt in January and I was doing a focus group with women from a very marginalized area and a woman told me this is the last time I vote and I asked her why now boys when they want to humiliate each other they tell each other that your mother went to election which means your mom was a dancer in the election so it's been used so these images are not just innocent images of women they have been used deliberately as a gender construction as a ways in which to show that men are working in politics and women are doing the dancing another recent image actually which is image of women who are joining ISIS and the division of labour between men and women joining ISIS we see that when it started to hear about women from Tunisia going to join Daesh the only issue that emerged is the Nikah el Jihad the sexual intercourse the whole etc so women are just going there for free sex or they are wanting to or chasing grooms they are jihadi prides and I'm sure most of you if you are following the last three the case of the three young girls who went to Syria from London from north London this is all what we have heard about them or about their intention why they have decided to go there but they were there because they wanted jihadi nikah and they wanted to be jihadi prides and two days ago one of the girls mother picked actually the media she was bigging the media please don't talk about my girls jihadi prides she's my baby and I know she's not there because of that she was crying bigging the media not to put her girl in this position and because we don't want to understand why three brilliant A-grade girls wanted to join ISIS and they don't want to be in London we are just putting them in a particular position in a particular space because they see women nothing but a source of pleasure and a sixth commodity so by this they are objectifying objectification of their act and we need them from the whole engagement of politics the third and last aspect of alienation is the alienation from the product of the revolution when we see that women were outside of the constitution making women were actually not participating in the reforming of the constitution or laws and these constitutions come not to recognize women rights and what we have already been granted for women before now is under renegotiations so instead of having our rights and freedoms being in these constitutions and in these laws we have to go now from the beginning and started to negotiate and renegotiate our rights and we start to do these compromises in Tunisia where this effort hasn't been successful but is still to open the issue to negotiation again that women rights are complementary of men or just a threat to women and just a sort of loss for women that makes them all the time have to fight again and again the NGOs laws in Egypt for instance so part of the NGOs challenge actually is their proposals which has to be approved by the social development ministry can be rejected if it includes the word women's empowerment just this could be a reason for their proposal to reject and Libby are the same they are not allowed to use gender or equality because these are very risky issues equity is better or equal opportunities actually so these kinds of, you don't see as a woman you didn't see the results of the revolution part of you so you don't identify yourself with this revolution you don't look at it as part of you so it becomes for women more alien and the revolution itself also alienate they are alienated from its results lens looking I just want to end by a note that the impact and gender impact of the revolution not just in countries where the revolution took places but also in other countries like Jordan where it's believed to be immune to revolutions but we see that what happens in Egypt in particular impacted Jordan it made the regime wanted to make more compromises with the tribe giving them more actually power because the regime wanted to keep its power so by that we see so many instances now against women because the tribes are openly having their own guns actually on the TV and the parliament everywhere in the country and we have two days ago a case where a woman in custody of her child which is something unnegotiable in the law it is granted there is no way a man can take a child from her mother unless there is a reason for that and when you have a court decision it is something impossible but because he comes from a very influential tribe and he is also rich he managed to do that and they put this woman because she refused to give the daughter to her father and they put her in the prison and the way she was out of the prison actually it's related to the absence of law because she was arrested without any legitimate legal procedures and she was released also without any legal procedures Thank you very much Thank you very much indeed So we now have Professor Nadil Ali from the SOA Centre for Gender Studies to be our discussant respondent whatever you want to do I think in 15 minutes I don't think it will take me that long I'm sure that there will be lots of questions I'll leave some time I think for me one of the key questions of today and maybe in life is are there any compromises that are not rotten or maybe to put it differently what does it take to have a compromise that's constructive and fruitful and maybe sort of to take a step back clearly we all come to constitution making the rule of law in the context of the Arab Spring from very different angles, disciplines and positionalities I mean as an anthropologist when I look at constitutions and the rule of law I pretty much look at them like I would look at the Quran or the Bible or any other texts for that matter I'm interested in the way that texts are interpreted in the way texts are implemented and the way they are sort of historically contingent and very much in agreement with Adam of course very much position contextualized within specific political economies and so the moment we do that it really is impossible in my mind from an anthropological perspective to look at the constitution as if it was sort of free floating and for me key in this debate is actually political authoritarianism and the way that political authoritarianism has intersected with constitution making and the rule of law the rule of law can of course be I can have laws and I'm not a legal expert at all but everything that I know about women's rights and human rights in the region I've worked on Iraq for example for a long time I know that you can have laws that are basically against human rights but you could still call it a rule of law if we go with that category so I think we need to be much more careful in terms of what kind of laws what kind of legislation now as a feminist scholar activist one key question is really this question of compromise and even I would maybe push it further cooption there's a long history actually of human rights activists women's rights activists in the region having been coopted by authoritarian states to push through certain legal reforms most notably actually in Tunisia but also to some extent in Egypt and when it comes to constitution making I was I said I mean I've worked on Iraq and there actually the question for many Iraqi women's rights activists after the invasion of 2003 was do we engage in a process of constitution making or a contestation of constitution in a context where the country is under occupation this is of course an extreme case we are speaking about Egypt and Tunisia we are focusing on those two countries you don't have occupations but in the Egyptian case you have a military dictatorship and I actually had long debates with a colleague a friend of mine who was one of the 50 member constitutional committee and agreed to be part of this committee in order to push through more woman friendly gender equal basic rights in the constitution now I have to say I felt I was really troubled when she agreed to do that but I also have to say that I don't know what I would have done I think it's very easy for us sitting in London to sort of judge people and say you know why would you I'm not sure and I think we have to be very careful in actually making those judgments but I think these are very difficult calls that have long histories and of course if you're a feminist activist more so than any other activist more so than a human rights activist more so than a Marxist activist you're always actually under the accusation of betraying your country being a puppet of the west imitating the west and so your political choices and strategies are even more under scrutiny I want to say something about political economy I very much agree with Adam that we need to look at the link between the specific political regime political culture, politics more broadly and the specific economy however I would slightly challenge him challenge you, sorry on the link between I mean when you're saying okay so I totally take your point that there is a link between or that there's this perception that democratisation should go alongside neoliberal economics and we know of course that this is hugely problematic but by the same token I may know when I look for instance historically at Iraq under the bath in the 70s you actually did have a state that very much used economics a more welfare I wouldn't call it socialist but a sort of more distributative economics as a way to actually co-opt a population and as a way to strengthen political authoritarianism and in a way to silence people so I think it goes into different directions I don't think it's just neoliberal economics that sort of strengthens authoritarianism so finally and then sort of linked maybe to a ffaf's paper which is of course very close to my heart I think that what is at stake in terms of constitution making and you know rule of law is also the reshaping and rethinking of gender regimes inbuilt in constitutions and rule of law are gender norms gender relations and I think what we see now unfolding in the region is actually coming together of challenging or sort of trying to envision a new political society and a new gender regime and I think that if I have any hope it's the fact I mean my perception is that we have a shift in the past women's issues gender based issues were always sort of second to the bigger struggles so first we're going to liberate from the colonizers first we're going to get rid of classes, we get rid of this oppressor and then we'll look at women's issues I think that increasingly you have especially younger generation of men who recognize that gender based rights and equalities have to be central in key to a more equal society at the same time of course we have what Denise Cagnotti very eloquently coined masculinist restoration where you have these counter evolutionary backlashes by the authoritarian regimes which are really also a form of sort of masculinist backlash so I think it's really important to look at those intersections I'm going to stop here, thank you Thank you very much, Nadia Right, would you like Nadia to carry on or should we have some questions first left over, let's have some questions first round, okay I'll take three perhaps and then we'll, oh hello my sword and one more oh hello Sam, yeah good, I'm afraid I don't know your name but you're first Hello, first of all I want to thank you all for your speeches and my question goes out to the full panel but it actually was brought up by Dr, I'm sorry I might mispronounce this, Javier but it had to do with the authentication of the video of the courageous woman in Syria and I don't contest her actions or that we are critical in a society of women who participate in activism but with the backdrop I attended a conference which was the Arab Investigative Journalist Conference in Amman and they discussed the issue of during the Arab Spring there are many self-proclaimed journalists with mobile phones or editors who go home and they just accumulate videos and put their own scope and how that seems to affect the local politics and they have no transparencies they're very biased and so what's the effect of this authentication of facts in the Arab Spring and the lack of authentication that transforms the traditional political activism in constructing new-age constitutions that are happening on the Arab Spring Thank you, we'll take the next two after if that's okay Masoud, Professor Barthely that's very efficient Thank you very much I just want to make a basic point but I think it's very very important because I mean a lot of the time when we talk about constitutionalism rule of law, we presume so much and it has actually come out from Nadia's presentation and others I mean for example many, my perception is is it the case that many of the Arab Spring countries I mean countries of the Middle East even developing African countries they are interested in doing constitutions but they don't understand constitutionalism you know here when you talk about constitutionalism you understand the fact that constitutionalism demands certain principles we are talking about women's rights we are talking about ordinarily this should be there if you are not doing that you are only just doing constitutions but not following principles of constitutionalism doing it to really emphasize that rather than emphasizing constitutions the same thing you talked about the rule of law and the first presenter talked about the fact that a country of laws what I wrote down here was I mean which law now for example when I used to work in the Sudan I mean many of the crackdowns that the government do when you talk for example in Sudan when I was talking to the security agencies they said they were not doing anything wrong they were following rule of law that is the national security law was passed by parliament it is good law of the country they are following it therefore it is the rule of law here when we talk about rule of law there are certain principles that you know must follow so I mean are we putting the cat before the horse really presuming that these principles when we talk about constitutionalism they are understood all over the world when we talk about rule of law they are understood all over the world it might be basic but I think it's a very important thing we might need to look at thank you we have Sam yet now and then I think we come back here and also Professor Faldal I think would like to come back on that last question as well when you finished perhaps on the constitutionality thank you very much again for a really interesting set of presentations it was just a first question sorry to Afaf in terms of I very much liked your presentation and looked at the change in all the shifting narratives in terms of presentation of women and women's autonomy and capacity I was just wondering when you were talking about women in your presentation who were these women in terms of where they were based because linking it back to what Nadja was saying in terms of intersectionality or developing gender regimes it raises the question right in terms of what intersectionality has Adam also talked about in terms of class and politics so in terms of women's narratives how do we kind of challenge that because I've also been working you know in terms of the UK and in terms of presentations of women Adam I really liked your presentation and I just wondered very much in terms of the relationship of yes understanding the relationship between law and political economy that these critiques also obviously very much apply in the west today in terms of disempowerment in terms of democracy what do we mean by democracy and its relationship so I wondered what you thought also of activists in the let's just say west and in terms of their engagement or challenging for example organisations such as the IMF and others that seem to have greater and greater powers or in terms of what we've just seen with what's going on in Greece and in terms of then developing critiques in terms of what's going on in various parts of the world in terms of how we can challenge that thank you Dr Barnau that's the first round over who would like to start? Afef thank you for your questions actually in the question of authenticity I'm aware that Daesh whatever they wanted us we don't know anything about them just what they wanted us actually to know and see and they are restricting videos coming out of the controlled area in Iraq Syria and it's actually fascinating how before Daesh took control over these areas we have seen so many videos coming from there but now videos are becoming less and less but for me the issue of authenticity is not an issue because I know that these women exist I know them because I live in this region and I know actually this woman looks like my grandmother and I know my grandmother if she's under this situation she will just do the same so that's why I'm not even if the video is fabricated but the video the way it has been made it couldn't be fabricated because there were people talking from behind and they were talking about other issues in Arabic which is not something that is translated in English so it looks like just a woman reading Quran to Daesh but we do have this problem of all of these videos but for me this issue of representation which is related to women that we cannot see them unless we question their effort and we question if they actually do exist I know that women in Iraq and Syria who we don't know anything about them right now they are doing even more than this more than just challenging Daesh by Quran and I'm sure after this end we will know more about them and the issue of intersectionality I've said that the women I'm talking about particularly in this presentation and who I try to apply the concept of alienation to them were just activist women either in Yemen or in Syria or in Egypt those who I've personally talked to and through them I figured out that this kind of loss and alienation from the whole process of the revolution but of course if we are representing every woman in the region we do have to take class because class and we have to take education and we have to take so many other issues so for instance women who are under one of the issues that I have presented actually which is the very big challenge right now related to the early marriage in the region for instance women from poor areas who were part of the activism were actually forced to marry and I know some of them were forced to do so while others who are coming from Rachi class were sent away to study for instance so there were so many ways in which those women either by their families because their families after particularly the situation in Egypt in relation to the mass rape and sexual harassment they started to be restricted by their families and they started to be restricted by their even friends not to go and participate in the revolution and the protest so class, education age all of these things play a significant role in the ways in which women react actually to the stage of the revolution thank you but do you want to respond to the constitutional question my short perhaps maybe just very briefly I know a code that would criminalise basically every form of speech so the only remark I was making is that there was some space to use rule of law as a progressive notion around which to rally four specific human rights reforms and that that has now become a counterproductive way of framing things basically because of the very swab approach I mean because of a very smooth approach by the regime to kind of present the post cool authoritarianism and then legitimise that in rule of law ok just maybe a few comments around Nadia's points and I mean I agree very much that authoritarianism is not unique to neoliberal governments and I agree very much also that the post war or the post second world war Arab national states where indeed in many ways very authoritarian and a lot of the features of those states were actually taken through into the regimes that emerged through the 1980s and 1990s in the region so for example the kind of corporatist union structures that existed and other kinds of ways of controlling society very much through the dominant party and these kinds of things were very much taken on board by Mubarak and others I think but I think the turn to neoliberalism in the 1980s in the region was very much marked by this increasing authoritarianism very much the centralisation of decision making powers in the hands of just a few individuals insulated from the wider state it was connected this wasn't just Egypt and Tunisia I think you can see the same processes in Morocco in Jordan very much very very similar so I mean I take the basic point but there is I think one of the ways that this kind of the state building debate is framed is this assumption that there is a democracy and neoliberalism going together and I think part of what we need to do in challenging that narrative is actually point out the record that they are very much interconnected on the question around the economic or challenging the IMF and other institutions in the west I mean I think it's clear in the global context the global economic crisis that we are seeing this emergence of an authoritarian neoliberalism in the west as well I think that's very very clear and at the beginning of the crisis in 2008 2009 a lot of people said this is the end of neoliberalism we're moving back to Keynesian solutions etc etc but it's I think it's been shown to be completely false any hopes that that would have been the case and so I think it is important that we see at this challenging by different activists my only kind of comment in relation to what we're talking about or in the Arab world is that often the Arab region or the Middle East gets left out of these these debates and these these movements you know we talk a lot about Europe but we don't talk about the connections between Europe and the Middle East and we need to remember if there is a resurgence of crisis in Europe North Africa in particular is going to be extremely extremely hard hit so I think that's something we need to kind of inject into these kinds of movements thank you Hiba very quickly you talked about obviously all the problems in Egypt in terms of the police brutality and culture of impunity as you suggested but I was curious to get a little greater sense of your notion of a positive sense of rule of law we know what the Egyptian state is it's a hyper positivistic sense of rule of law and to I think challenge that when implicitly has to have a conception of law being higher there's a kind of law that exists higher than the positive formulations of the state and where that law exists obviously is a matter of contention but I would be interested to hear your conception of where such a law would exist in the Egyptian context what is the source of a higher law in the Egyptian context that can be appealed to to confront the abuses of the Egyptian state I mean suppose tomorrow the Egyptian state passed a law that the police can shoot anyone on site under their positivist conception of law they would say they're acting under the rule of law I presume you would say that's not a rule of law that's a misrule of law but you would have to appeal to something higher than their mere statutory formulation so what are the moral resources available to the Egyptian people to resist that May I just ask you a question I wondered whether you had a quick response to Masou's question Well I think it's the same kind of question actually It's the same kind of question, I'll have that and then we'll hear it back perhaps You try to be more specific OK, good, thank you Doctor Latas out there Do you want to take the mic? If anybody else has a question try to catch my eye Thank you Thank you for the presentations Actually my own work I have seen many similarities between what's going on Middle East which I described 30 years war and what was in 30 years war in Europe and there is long way to discuss about revolution and also constitution as well and I think Ottoman land is from which start 1990s from the Balkans really melting as well From that point I would like to ask Doctor Jabiri We know that ISIS directly referring pre-Islam 1632 and actually they are critical of all interpretation of the Quran itself and they are burning down the mosques and if we know this account how they can take account one lady's description of the Quran That's my first question Second question if that lady if we think that they took her account as a positive development of how can you put this one as a gender development if other people who cannot read Quran who cannot rise Quran other genders which is Yazidis or other genders can be under pressure and how can you put this one under the gender development as well Thank you Thank you. I have three more questions we'll have to be a little brief because I think we're not going to run out of time but in sorry Martin right on the other side and right in the middle please if I could find a more challenging one for you I shall So this might be in a bit of a different tangent but I've been studying women's roles in democratisation and I was wondering do you this is a question for Doctor Jabiri and Doctor Ali Do you believe that the difference the difference we saw in Egypt and Tunisia and you know the aftermath of the revolutions do you think that has anything to do with reflecting like the different progress of women's rights in the respective countries and what would you say could you comment maybe on that link Thank you Thank you Just right in front of you Thank you This is a question for Doctor Jabiri I thought your presentation was fantastic, really very very thought provoking. I'm not an academic and it really was very very interesting for me and I really liked what you said about the stage of the revolution that we're not a situation where it's over we're not in the aftermath of a revolution we're just in a certain stage and I just wondered what you thought the next stage was and what kind of hurdles do you think need to be overcome particularly for women before there is more forward movement and also I wondered if you saw more of a more of public ownership by women of their revolutionary activities in the future and also whose responsibility is that is it women's responsibility to take public ownership of their revolutionary activities or is it somebody else's responsibility or maybe it's everybody's or I don't know, interested in your views Thank you Just one more Sorry Martin it is true, right down here I did not fix I did not fix that Oh no, give us a pleasure to make you proud Everybody else has to hear it not just us, the point is So this kind of goes back to the first panel and I think the discussant and the first panel's questions around radical possibility and one of the things you know, throughout these two panels that I found kind of interesting was the way that the state remains stable and the language around the law is quite stable in the ways that it's discussed and I think this also goes back to this question of a positivist definition of the rule of law So one of the things that I'm curious about is what has been the consequences of the law and the discourses on the law and the legal term in this new kind of neoliberalized economy and politics to the ways in which organisers and activists and community leaders describe their demands and organize themselves I think the consequences as far as I can tell for example around international law and the way that Palestinians organize have been really quite clear and illustrative but I'm curious as to sort of how does human rights law and the way that that is framed how has that reflected the ways and the possibilities and the frames and the limits of organising in Egypt and around issues like gender Okay thank you Shall we start The question related to Daesh and the woman I for sure wasn't advocating for interpretation of Islam or of Quran or any other sources but what I wanted to show that that knowledge of Quran or knowledge of any other knowledge that women have on the ground they develop it through their own activities they develop it they do have it that's not just they are ignorant or anything that women do have their own knowledge and through this knowledge they can resist such kind of hardship practices of of Daesh and of course I wasn't showing that through this case that Daesh they were good to this woman maybe her age was an aspect actually because she's really really very old maybe over 80 or maybe no they were not interested in anything so it wasn't just an advocacy to show that the reading for Quran or they are not doing this because she's reading Quran or because she's Sunni or whatever because I don't know actually if she's Sunni or Shia or from what what sect but and this woman for sure knows that it is really dangerous to do this because she knows that Daesh do not differentiate between Yazidis or Sunni or Shia and they kill whoever would come in their own their way so that's why I wanted to show her case because she was really brave and I believe that this thing even if this video is not authentic this is something could be happening now in Iraq and in Syria relation to the second question which is really of course as they said in my presentation revolution itself didn't come without women's contribution women were part of women who made this reality their sacrifices their work all over the history not just before the revolution so they made that a reality it's just a matter that I was criticizing that it was not recognized in this way and it was shown as a state of exceptionalism the other thing where we are going the second stage what I can say right now a bit hopeful in relation to some aspects actually before the revolutions there are issues where we cannot demand publicly like the issue of having secular laws when it comes to family laws we always asked for reforming family laws now we can see in Egypt in Tunisia the situation although it is progressive but it's still based in Sharia and we can see in Jordan and Palestine that there are women who are asking for particular rights for family issues and for their rights in relation to divorce so this gives hope that even within this kind of extreme violence chaos and absence of law there is still hope because we see that the discourse of women and the demands of women are developing are not going backward and they are not staying okay we do have a sense of stress maybe the stress of what's happening and who isn't actually in the world looking at the region and what's happening right now but still there are some hopes that there will be a second stage when I don't know but from what I see the level that we are working on particularly when it comes to Sharia laws and family laws that gives hope that we are continuing and in a second level and of course it is responsibility for all it's not just responsibility for women it's the absence of women and discrimination against women and actually what I wanted to say that this discrimination and gender construction works well with the state as part of their efforts to restore regime's power it's an necessity for them making women as a community objectification of their act or isolating of them and alienating them it's part of the process of regime restoration which shows that women's matter their issues matter and it should be responsibility if everyone not just women. I hope I asked I answered all the questions Thank you Hibba No it's just that women will criticize security services for sexual abuse and detention and women in fact CC for visiting the victim of sexual violence in hospital surrounded by 10 other military men when she just been mass raped the week before and this is the problem of corruption that we are talking about and I wouldn't actually necessarily the current state you are talking about who at least tried to fight within the context of the constitution I don't think she is the problem I think the people who are the problem are the ones who are doing this public because of course CC likes Osamu Bada before him realizes that a few gestures on women's rights helps this you know this I am the civilized role of law benevolent ruler because if you are on the confronting the security services side the cost of empowerment today is very high and people are really living in fear so not just to contextualize I am actually going as a check the problem is that the checks right now are not operating I was trying to use the Mubarak era analogy and not just 2011 I mean 2011 is great because it is an example of what was possible within the structures of this political system and legal system and one can always hold that up there and say well you know if you can at least go back to prosecuting six police officers over a period of five years this is the Egyptian government producing these numbers for the UPR they were very proud of it in 2010 I mean that is better than where we are where we are today I think the constitution does actually have some rights protections in them that one can use the only way one can use them is by trying to to give meaning to these laws that have always been on the books when we hear 71 constitution had some good rights protections in them as well a lot of them are very vague but the whole question is how through strategic litigation use the laws that are on the books to give meaning to them and I'll use that to just make a final comment to I think your intervention we haven't really talked about socio-economic rights because there is a very strong discourse on socio-economic rights here again I think it's not just the rights community it's the rights in the left and the labour rights community have been effective in using rights discourse which is always kind of out there because of our socialist heritage but that stays alive because the socio-economic crisis they have very high expectations that they have after four years are remaining very high and so there is a bit of an opportunity there I think to use socio-economic rights and use the legal system as it exists right now to try and give some meaning to the rights protections thank you very much we're going to have Adam now and then Nadia and I think we're going to wrap up okay just very quickly I'll respond to the question about the legal turn and I'm going to speak on the basis of Palestine again and I agree very much with the point that is being made that although it's useful at times to make appeals to law and to human rights principles this can be very useful in terms of building movements and building solidarity in the case of Palestine I don't think it can be the only basis or even the ultimate basis on which we actually look to build movements or to find support or justification for movements and I think that comes back to what I was trying to say that we need to see the way that legal forms reflect in many ways power relations and it's actually those power relations that we need to tackle and put up front not that we shouldn't use these kind of fora when they should and I can be used but to keep that in mind Okay just also reacting to the question about differences between Egypt and Tunisia and whether they're reflecting the different progress of women's rights I think the idea of progress of women's rights is problematic because it does assume a kind of linear and also uniform situation and I think we haven't very much talked about class of course we've talked about political economy and I would say that of course when we speak about access to legal rights class is so important and when I think about the urban middle class educated Korean women I know there is not of course they have problems but in terms of access to legal rights is very very different to women in Upper Egypt who might be illiterate and do not even know what their legal rights are not to speak of not being able to pay for a lawyer so I think one big issue of course when comparing Egypt and Tunisia that poverty I mean political economy is quite different I mean poverty economic crisis unemployment is devastating in the Egyptian context actually I mean of course there are all kinds of economic issues in Tunisia as well but I think it's on a very very different scale and then I would say that another difference is that the backlash has been very different and that we know that both Islamism and militarism or military regime are very strong authoritarian patriarchal systems which often carry with them a backlash against women's rights and I think that's what we see unfolding much more in the Egyptian context and in the Tunisian context for all the various reasons that we mentioned before Thank you, I'd like to don't clap just yet I know you're really on the edge I'd like to thank this panel very much indeed, that was under wonderful discussion and thank you all for your contributions I'd like to thank the panel, the earlier panel as well and I'd like to thank on your behalf Nimr Sultani for organizing the show would you like to come down and close up or have you got a roving mic up there okay so I'd like first of all to thank all of you for attending and for being here and thank you all first of all for my conference assistant Isabel Leach and to all the speakers, discussants moderators this has been fantastic thank you very much and I look forward to more events thank you thank you