(offenses punishable by penal servitude or death). Lower courts handled the majority of the cases that reached adjudication and levied fines in about nine out of ten cases. At their discretion, courts could suspend fines or imprisonment (when a sentence did not exceed one year). Capital crimes that carried a possible death sentence included murder, manslaughter occurring in the commission of a felony, arson or the use of explosives that caused death, rape, treason, and endangerment of state security. Few convictions for capital crimes, however, resulted in execution. Egypt's laws require that a detained person be brought before a magistrate and formally charged within forty-eight hours or released. An accused is entitled to post bail and had the right to be defended by legal counsel. The Emergency Law of 1958 outlined special judicial procedures for some cases. The law enabled authorities to circumvent the increasingly independent regular court system in cases where people were charged with endangering state security. The law applied primarily to Islamic radicals but also covered leftists suspected of political violence, drug smugglers, and illegal currency dealers. It also allowed detention of striking workers, pro-Palestinian student demonstrators, and relatives of fugitives. The Emergency Law of 1958 authorized the judicial system to detain people without charging them or guaranteeing them due process while an investigation was under way. After thirty days, a detainee could petition the State Security Court to review the case. If the court ordered the detainee's release, the minister of interior had fifteen days to object. If the minister overruled the court's decision, the detainee could petition another State Security Court for release after thirty more days. If the second court supported the detainee's petition, it released the detainee. The minister of interior could, however, simply re-arrest the detainee. The government commonly engaged in this practice in cases involving Islamic extremists. Civil code The Egyptian Civil Code is the prime source of civil law, and has been the source of law and inspiration for numerous other Middle Eastern jurisdictions, including pre-dictatorship Libya and Iraq as well as Qatar. Egypt's Civil Code governs "the areas of personal rights, contracts, obligations, and torts." According to EgyptJustice.com, "due to the long court litigation delays caused by a crushing (and steadily growing) backlog of civil cases, plus weak mechanism for enforcing court judgments, large commercial disputes are often resolved through arbitration, as governed by the Arbitration Law (Law 27