The blogger, computer scientist and militant left was sentenced on Monday, December 20, by the State Security Court, like two other men.
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Even before the trial took place, Laila Soueif knew his son, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, convicted. “His crime, like millions of young people in Egypt and well beyond, is to have thought that another world was possible. And to try to do it,” wrote the professor of mathematics and activist of rights Egyptian Humans in A forum published in the New York Times on December 17, published in French on the site Orient xxi.
Monday, December 20, the 40-year-old informative computer programmer, which has become 2011 revolution icon, was sentenced by the State Security Court to five years in prison for “dissemination of false information” , a tweet denouncing the death of an inmate under torture. His former lawyer, Mohamed Al-Baqer, was sentenced for the same four-year charges, just like the Mohamed blogger “Oxygen” Ibrahim, accused of relaying videos of anti-government events.
“Their conviction is a parrody of justice and reminds us that terrible repression still has courses in Egypt against everything dissident, despite the lifting of the state of emergency by the authorities”, denounces Katia Roux, charged advocacy in Amnesty International. Since its arrival, as a result of the army dismissal of the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi is accused by NGOs to engage in all-round repression against his opponents and the Human rights defenders. According to them, Egypt has more than 60,000 operators.
Seven years in prison since 2013
Since the imposition of the state of emergency in April 2017, 143 cases concerning political dissidents and defenders of rights have been judged before the State Security Court, according to a count established by Amnesty International in September . His surveillance, at the end of October, did not end the procedures incurred: at least twenty since August, considers the organization. “These are unique procedures, which violate the rules of fairness and deprive them of the right of appeal. The only way out is that President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi cancels these verdicts”, pursues Katia Roux.
“My repeated detention is a chapter in the history of our family struggle,” Already wrote Alaa Abd El-Fattah, in August 2014, from the Tora Prison, in the suburbs of Cairo, a week before the death of his Father, Ahmed Seif al-Islam, a communist activist who was held several times under the reigns of Anouar el-Sadate and Hosni Mubarak, before becoming human rights lawyer. In his turn imprisoned under Mubarak, Alaa Abd el-Fattah took over the family torch, just like his two cadetic sisters, Mona and Sanaa, and he played a central role in the 2011 uprising that caused the fall of the autocrat. .
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