Somaya Selim[1]

Egypt has faced serious terrorist violence, giving counter-terrorism a legitimate place within the state’s sovereign responsibility to protect its population. In response, the enactment of the Counter-Terrorism Law (Law No. 94 of 2015) and the Terrorist Entities Law (Law No. 8 of 2015) restructured the country’s national security architecture. While international and domestic legal debate routinely scrutinizes the linguistic breadth of these statutes, focusing primarily on the scope of criminalized conduct, this emphasis obscures a deeper institutional reality. The critical legal question is no longer simply who may be prosecuted as a terrorist, but rather what the justice system becomes empowered to do once the terrorism framework is invoked. A terrorism classification operates as a powerful legal gateway. It fundamentally alters an individual’s procedural trajectory, modifies the mechanisms of pretrial detention, shifts the dynamics of judicial review, and ultimately tests the practical boundaries of access to justice long before guilt or innocence is finally adjudicated.