Judges in Egypt are threatening to disrupt supervision of presidential and parliamentary elections later this year if key judicial reforms are not passed beforehand.

The threats are part of an unprecedented attempt by some members of the judiciary to push Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak into conceding greater separation of executive and judicial powers. As many as 1,000 of Egypt's 12,000 judges should attend a meeting of the Judges' Club - the professional association - in Alexandria on Friday where a boycott of the elections will be debated. A subsequent meeting would be held in Cairo next month, they said.