A Second Violation of the Sharia Provision: Egypt’s SCC’s Ruling of 12 May 2013, in the Case No. 37/xxxiii (Annotated and Translated)

Abstract

In mid-2013, Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court found a statutory provision in force at the time of the decision to be in violation of the constitutional provision declaring the principles of Islamic sharia the chief source of legislation (Article 2). It was the second time since the provision was originally introduced in the Constitution in 1971 and later amended in 1980. It had only happened once before, in 2006. In the ruling considered here, the Court confirmed its conventional construction of Article 2, and declared that in the case at hand the legislator had simply overstepped its boundaries by restricting the exercise of the grandparents’ visitation rights to the case of the absence of parents. In the eyes of the Court, the legislator was entitled to regulate grandparents’ visitation rights, but in doing so it did not properly align its intervention with the overall objectives of sharia (maqāṣid). The ruling was issued in a relatively peaceful phase that followed a fierce and prolonged confrontation between the Court and Islamists the previous year.