Egypt
Egypt's First Female Judge
Hijri 1370-Present (AH); Common Era 1950-Present (CE)
When Tahani Al Gebali, a prominent Egyptian lawyer, was appointed in January 2003 to be the country's first-ever female judge, she herself hailed it as a landmark for Egyptian women. Until recently a member of the Nasserist Party, El-Gebali has spent her career as a lawyer. Graduating from Cairo University's Faculty of Law in 1973, she later earned a diploma in Islamic Shari'a, or Islamic law, and was the first woman elected to the board of the Lawyer's Syndicate in 1989, being re-elected in the following round of elections. In 1992, she was the first woman elected to the Permanent Bureau of the Union of Arab Lawyers. She is also a legal expert at the UN, an international commercial arbitrator and a lecturer at the Arab Institute for Human Rights in Tunis.
