During Judge Ghada Aoun’s raid in Awkar this weekend, she was caught on video discrediting the October 17 Lebanese Revolution and calling her own protest the “real Thawra“.
“That revolution of yours is trash,” she was caught saying in a video to Lebanese antigovernmental revolutionaries. “This is the real thawra, the revolution of the judiciary.”
These claims come in stark contrast with her actions against anti-corruption activists.
Clamping down on freedom of speech
In February last year, she ordered the arrest of activist Charbel Khoury because he refused to delete a tweet criticizing the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), the political party founded by now-Lebanese President Michel Aoun and led by Gebran Bassil.
In June, she had a role in the controversial detainment of activist Michel Chamoun, who was arrested for posting a video where he said President Aoun’s reign was a “humiliation.”
Chamoun’s arrest sparked protests across the country. Protesters blocked the road in front of the Serail and insisted they would not leave until Chamoun was released. It was Judge Aoun who declared to protesters that Chamoun would not be released until they left.
Also in 2020, acting judicially partial as both the plaintiff and the judge, she “personally” sued and ordered the arrest of the art historian and curator Gaby El-Daher over a social media post.
El-Daher, whose post reiterated what Michel Aoun had stated that the country is going to hell, was detained for about 6 hours before his lawyer managed to release him.
Turning a blind eye
Despite her claim of undertaking “a thawra against corruption,” and calling “trash” the revolution of the nation against all corrupts without discrimination, Judge Aoun has not demonstrated the same impartiality as the people of the revolution.
She hasn’t come close to any publicly-known corruption cases that involve officials of her FPM party and its ally Hezbollah, including the electricity crisis, which FPM reportedly refused to hand over the files, the consistent smuggling into Syria by Hezbollah, as admitted recently by one of its clerics, the highly controversial Bisri Dam project, which an FPM official still wants to revive, and so on.
While accusing the revolutionaries’ basic rights of expression as violations and slandering their rights to protest as “trash”, Judge Aoun has herself committed up to 17 judicial violations in her raid during the weekend.
That has prompted the High Judicial Council to exceptionally meet on Monday to discuss her actions and summoned her to appear before the Council on Tuesday.
It remains to see whether punitive actions would be taken or political intervention would force the disregard of her multiple violations.
