Power and resistance in interrogations of suspects in the Egyptian judicial process

Abstract

The thesis investigates how using a discourse pragmatic approach gives insight into the complexities of hand-written interrogation records. Data come from eighteen Egyptian interrogations from the years 2007 to 2011. It includes five interrogations with ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Gamal, and Alaa, which took place in 2011 after the 25th January revolution, as well as with ordinary workers, traders and company managers. In addition, data include interrogations in criminal cases with a variety of offences such as drugs, murder, political cases and embezzlement. This study examines the pragmatic and linguistic choices that prosecutors and suspects make to express power relations, modes of resistance and information gathering/confirmation in inquisitorial interviews in Egypt. This helps give insights into questioning practices in Egypt’s legal system and the interactional goals and methods of such speech events. In addition, it includes exploring the challenges of analysing and translating a written record, and establishing the journey of a suspect’s statement in Egyptian interrogations. Analysis reveals that suspects were able to resist some of prosecution’s accusations and control. However, the more controlling the questions became the less able were they to answer cooperatively while maintaining their innocence on the record. Exceptions to that were suspects who received legal advice from lawyers or worked in the legal field. Questioning strategies such as the use of and/wa-prefaced questions and Put on Record (POR) questions in the data have revealed that the current recording practices are sometimes limiting and coercive whether intended or not due to the special attention given to recording the institutional version of the narrative. Moreover, suspects are not invited to freely give their own narrative. This results in the production of an altered interrogation record. Implications for the field of Egyptian interrogations and interrogation more widely are discussed.