The Judicial Fracture: Digital Vice Policing, Sovereign Extortion, and the Mutation of Process as Punishment in Egypt (2023– 2025)
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: How does authoritarian morality policing adapt to the changing technological milieu, and how does thatdigital shift alter the fundamental nature of legal penalty? Drawing on an original frontline dataset of 121legal aid cases involving 163 individuals prosecuted between 2023 and 2025, this article argues that Egyptianvice enforcement has undergone a structural mutation rather than a simple technological upgrade. The statehas shifted from visible street-level policing to a cyber-surveillance dragnet that produces arrests throughdigital entrapment, device seizure, and the archival circulation of intimate data. The evidence shows a 97percent digital arrest rate, a 384 percent increase in documented prosecutions over three years, and a 79.3percent appellate acquittal rate, which together point to a judicial fracture rather than a straightforwardcorrection of error. Rather than treating appellate reversals as proof of self-correction, the article arguesthat the Egyptian case extends Malcolm Feeley’s concept of process as punishment into the digital era.Punishment now begins with digital interception, is amplified by bureaucratic fabrication and forensicviolence, and is stabilized by appellate laundering that restores formal innocence after social and economicdamage has already occurred.
Author: Noralla, Nora
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204436085