Via Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition:
Justice experts from around the country came to Cairo yesterday to find out about the status of the second round of negotiations with the Ministry of Justice. The ministry released a statement denouncing the crisis and saying that all experts have resumed work.
“Everything that concerns incentives, the way cases are delivered from courts and assignments of experts to courts in addition to the experts’ law project was agreed upon during the last negotiations,” the statement said.
The statement also said that the experts came to Cairo to avoid protesting. Experts denied this statement, reiterating that their strike will continue until their demands are met. Experts also denied being informed with what came in the statement, assuring that their strike will continue until their demands are fulfilled by a ministerial statement.
“We weren’t even notified with what happened in the last negotiations,” a striking expert said.
The experts continued their call for President Hosni Mubarak to settle the conflict so they can return home before the holy month of Ramadan. They are also demanding a set of protocols to end the strike to be agreed upon with the ministry.
The experts are the Justice Ministry civil servants assigned with technical consultancies during judicial investigations and trials. One of their primary demands is the cancellation of a decision that gives courts the right to send the experts only a portion of each case’s entire file. The experts say their working conditions are much harder. Instead of receiving the whole case file at once, they receive only a few documents from each case file, meaning they are forced to go and collect the rest of the case information from a number of sources. The ensuing waste of time, effort and money, they say, will be immense.
The other demand is a change in job regulations that were established at the time of King Farouk by royal decree number 96 in1952. These regulations set the ground rules for salaries, transportation remuneration and other rules for the experts to work by some 55 years later.
