Alaa Abdel Fattah for more than two years. He has spent a total of seven years in prison since 2013.
Le Monde with AFP
Alaa Abdel Fattah, a central figure of the 2011 revolt in Egypt, already in pre-trial detention, was sentenced to five years in prison by an exceptional court of Cairo for “dissemination of false information”, announced his sister , Mona Seif, on Twitter , Monday 20 December . The verdict can not be called upon.
Two other activists have been sentenced to four years in prison for the same expenses: Mohamed Al-Baqer, the former lawyer of Mr. Abdel Fattah, and the Mohamed Ibrahim blogger, alias oxygen.
Already seven years behind the bars
Nicknamed “The 2011 Revolution icon, which chased the President Hosni Mubarak power, Mr. Abdel Fattah has already been the subject of several convictions. He was imprisoned under the regimes of the Hosni Mubarak autocrat, his Islamist successor Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013) and the current head of state, Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi. In pre-trial detention for more than two years, he has spent a total of seven years in prison since 2013. In October, a collection of articles by Mr. Abdel Fattah since 2011 had been published, under the title you have not yet been vanquished.
m. Abdel Fattah, Political activist and computer programmer, had been arrested in 2013 after an unauthorized event. He was accused of organizing an “illegal manifestation”, “provoked a riot” and “struck a police officer and stole his radio transmitter”. However, he continued to express themselves on social networks, defending the rights of other former detainees, forced to spend their nights behind the bars after the end of their prison sentence.
Liberated under judicial review in March 2019, Mr. Abdel Fattah had been arrested with his lawyer, M e Baqer in September of the same year. The two men had been added to the “terrorist” list of Cairo at the end of 2020. Mr. Ibrahim, founder of the blog “Oxygen Egypt”, was also arrested in 2019 after publishing on the social networks videos relating to Anti-citizenship events, according to Amnesty International.
According to the Egyptian law, the duration of the pre-trial detention can not exceed two years, but in practice the detainees can stay longer behind the bars.
Sixty thousand Opinion detainees
In An editorial published by the New York Times Saturday, his mother had lamented that” the world diverted him “after being” formerly inspired by the Egyptian revolutionaries “. “His crime, as for millions of young people in Egypt and elsewhere, was to believe that another world was possible. And he had the courage to try to make it possible,” she wrote.
Saturday, the German government had called for the release of the three activists, hoping for a “fair trial”. Egypt had denounced a “flagrant and unjustified interference in home affairs” in the country.
The Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), which considers bloggers as journalists, rejected the verdict, judging it “unacceptable”. “The condemnation of Alaa Abdel Fattah and Mohamed Oxygen to years of prison is unacceptable and shows how far the authorities are ready to go to punish these journalists for their work,” said Sherif Mansour, Middle East and Africa coordinator. North CPJ, who called for their “immediate release”.
Since its arrival, as a result of the dismissal of Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013, President Sissi is accused by international human rights NGOs, to engage in all-round against opponents and Human rights defenders. According to them, Egypt has more than 60,000 inmates of opinion.
The Government denies, which emphasizes the maintenance of stability in the country. The Egyptian authorities regulate local and international NGOs to benefit from doubtful financing and act on the basis of political grounds against the interests of Cairo. The United States, which believes that the country violates human rights in all areas, consequently frozen 10% of their help.