Government moves to freeze Criminal Procedure Law hours before deadline

The House of Representatives’ Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a draft law to postpone enforcement of the contested new Criminal Procedure Code (Law No. 174 of 2025) for a full year, delaying its rollout to Oct. 1, 2027, instead of its scheduled implementation tomorrow, Thursday, Oct. 1. The bill was introduced by Nation’s Future Party lawmaker Hesham El-Hosary, who cited the “lack of technical and physical infrastructure across the courts.”(*)

The eleventh-hour legislative maneuver came just 24 hours before the contentious statutory overhaul was scheduled to take effect on Thursday, Oct. 1, freezing an enactment process that human rights advocates and legal scholars have resisted for months.

The draft bill—which contains a single substantive article alongside a standard publication clause— is slated to be presented to the general plenary session to complete its enactment procedures through ratification by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

The amendment explicitly replaces the phrase “the first of October following the date of its publication” in Article 6 of the issuance provisions of Law No. 174 of 2025 with “the first of October of the year 2027.”

In an explanatory memorandum reviewed by Al Manassa, the government conceded that administrative, institutional, digital, and human preparations remain insufficient to enact the statutory provisions.

Practical realities, the memo stated, demand that state authorities have adequate time to verify the complete operational readiness of the system “in a manner that guarantees the execution of all obligations and preserves the rights and freedoms of citizens.”

The memorandum detailed the technical failures underlying the postponement, noting that the judiciary requires an extended grace period to establish digital networks, legal databases, and electronic communication channels between criminal justice agencies.

The document underscored acute deficits in the mechanisms governing “electronic summonses” and the framework for “remote investigation and litigation.”

Executive authorities also cited the need for an expansive transitional period to train judicial, security, and administrative personnel across all Egyptian governorates. The cabinet stressed that field staff must conduct “practical trials” to identify operational obstacles before courts face a binding legal mandate to enforce the procedures.

The legislative push followed an announcement late Tuesday evening by the House Secretariat revealing that El-Sisi had decreed an emergency parliamentary sitting for Wednesday—a mere day before the scheduled inauguration of the legislature’s second ordinary session of its third term on Thursday.

While the executive framed the retreat around logistical failures, the concession converges with months of mounting resistance from legal bodies and rights organizations.

The Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession (ACIJLP) issued the latest in a series of appeals, directly demanding that authorities freeze the law until October 2027 to address structural barriers, finish executive preparations, and train ministerial staff.

The center emphasized that fierce disputes have reignited over the code’s most contentious measures, singling out newly introduced provisions governing travel bans, expanded powers granted to the public prosecution, restrictions on defense rights, eroded safeguards for the accused, and remote trials.

The organization emphasized that these provisions “were subject to criticism and amendment demands by civil society organizations, law professors, UN committees, and special rapporteurs at the Human Rights Council.”

A broad coalition comprising 23 political parties, rights groups, and bar associations had previously petitioned El-Sisi to reject the statute, warning that amendments rubber-stamped by parliament marked a “setback and regression” from core constitutional liberties. The coalition drew particular attention to Article 64, which permits authorities to interrogate an accused individual “in cases of necessity” without legal counsel present.

The ACIJLP warned that the legislative impact of implementing these articles “carries a gravity that cannot be remedied or measured in the near future,” noting that the dispute touches foundational safeguards for the administration of justice enshrined in international conventions and Article 93 of the Egyptian Constitution.

El-Sisi originally ratified the new law last November amid heavy domestic rights opposition, setting an effective date of Oct. 1, 2026. The presidency claimed at the time that a one-year cushion would grant judges, public prosecutors, judicial police officers, and defense lawyers sufficient opportunity to master the new provisions, while allowing court administrators to set up the telephone-notification centers mandated by law.

International scrutiny has compounded domestic pushback. In October 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights encouraged Egyptian authorities to reconsider the proposed criminal procedural code, voicing profound concern over ongoing allegations of “enforced disappearances and the continued practice of torture and ill-treatment.”

The cabinet’s sudden admission of total unreadiness directly contradicts statements from the Ministry of Justice, which spent recent weeks insisting that legal bodies were fully prepared for Thursday’s scheduled rollout. 

On Aug. 31, the ministry launched its remote criminal litigation platform, describing it as a central pillar of the procedural apparatus created under the new statute.

Justice Minister Mahmoud El-Sherif subsequently issued a formal decree organizing the operations of digital and telephone notification centers across the country, fulfilling the statutory mandate to establish an office in every courthouse nationwide to serve legal notices to plaintiffs and defendants electronically rather than via traditional court bailiffs.

(*) In an earlier version of this report, Al Manassa published that the government had submitted the draft law. The error was corrected on Sept. 30, 2026, for accuracy.