:PROPERTIES:
:ID:       9c373425-fe4c-4ef5-b0e2-0e0bbaccc0b9
:CREATED:  [2018-03-22 Thu 08:46]
:MODIFIED: [2018-05-27 Sun 19:45]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Legal archive
#+filetags: EF

My main point remains from four years ago: I do not think I know enough to comment on the analysis, commentary and writing you publish on the website. I am, however, aware of how organisation and making available of knowledge is valuable in its own right, aside from the scholarship built on top it. Because of the state of (non-)disclosure in Egypt, civil society finds itself in need of compiling, organising and, ideally, publishing raw data before scholars and analysts are able to study it. I imagine LSRU an ideal place to hold a resource of Egypt's body law that can answer the following database queries:

- show the current amended text ( of Act X (most of Egypt's long standing law are amended tens of times by parliament and the SCC, including the penal code, the civil code, political parties act, election law...)
- show historical development of legal area X
- list all penal sections in the entire body law
- list all penal sections related to concepts such as public order so one can actually find an operational definition from practice
- compare different sanctions and their relative weight. For example, the weight of telecoms speech crime vs broadcast speech crime, or the weight of physical assault vs sex assault vs speech crime vs fraud, all against state/legal persons/natural persons
- list all gender-specific legislation (or other discrimination categories)
- list numbers of all secret laws

To do this, we need to build a near-complete, hyper-linked, semantically tagged database of the dozen thousand statues issued in Egypt. The vast majority of these go back to the legislation spike and almost total remake in the mid 1950s, making this database useful if we manage to compile, digitize, store, OCR and tag a few decades of statutes (ideally, work should start from issues of the Official Gazetta, not individual statutes). With a few exceptions, almost everything before the mid-1950s is replaced and only useful for its historical value. My

impression is that about half of statues passed under Mubarak are the budget or petroleum concessions, so value-wise most of current legislation also happened earlier. This relates to my main comment for the shorter-term focus (2011-present) LSRU chose four years ago.

Working on this project is a past-time of mine among a few other things, so my progress is rather slow. Over the past years I managed to compile and store the vast majority of statues from the present time back to early 1980s, so halfway going back historically to the mid-1950s and about one third going back in terms of statute count.