Insulting the Person of the Sovereign: A Documented Historical Study from 1866 to the Present

Insulting the person of the ruler is among the issues that have continued to impose themselves on Egyptian history in the relationship between the head of state, whatever his title: king, sultan or president of the republic, and the Egyptians in their institutions, whether parliamentary or press, or even at the level of individuals. This phenomenon begins after the establishment of the Consultative Council of Deputies in 1866, for the emergence of a legislative institution means the existence of more than one opinion, one of which may contradict the opinion of the Khedival person. In the same period the phenomenon of the national press also appeared, which became a third party in the equation, exposing a newspaper such as Al-Ahram to closure. We then saw the phenomenon extend beyond that. It is true that the monarchy was abolished in 1953, and the constitutional text providing for insulting the royal person fell with it, but that was true only in theory. In practice, insulting the person of the head of state was not permitted, even if his title was president of the republic and he enjoyed political powers that require their criticism. We therefore decided to follow the phenomenon under each of Presidents Nasser and Sadat, who in 1980 issued an elastic law allowing him to prosecute those who insulted him, under the name of the Law on the Protection of Values from Shame, and we went further and reached the era of President Mubarak, despite the political flavor of writing about it.