RIGHTS-EGYPT: Retrial of an Activist Seen as Politically Motivated

By Cam McGrath Reprint | | Print |

Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Apr 29 2002 (IPS) - Egyptian-American rights activist Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim is back in court this week for a retrial after Egypt’s highest appeals court overturned his original conviction upon finding gross irregularities in the initial court case.

Ibrahim, a sociology professor at the American University in Cairo, founded the independent Ibn Khaldun Centre for development Studies (IKCDS) in 1988 and directed its operations until it was shut down during a police raid in June 2000.

Last May, a state security court sentenced him and 27 of his associates to prison terms ranging from one to seven years on charges of receiving funding without government authorisation, embezzling funds from the European Union and tarnishing Egypt’s image.

The Court of Cassation ordered the release of Ibrahim and his associates in February after finding sufficient grounds for a retrial in a case that human rights groups described as politically motivated.

“Amnesty International considers these charges to be politically motivated, constituting efforts to provide legal cover for the government’s increasing attempts to muzzle civil society,” the London-based human rights organisation said.

Ibrahim, who uses a walking stick because of the degenerative neurological disease that he suffers, moved slow but appeared upbeat when he returned to court on Saturday before a new panel of three judges.

The court approved the defence team’s request to summon witnesses, but did not respond to a plea to allow Ibrahim to travel abroad for urgent medical treatment. Monday’s session lasted over nine hours due to scheduling conflicts and Ibrahim appeared physically exhausted by its end.

The prosecution’s charges are the same as in the first trial. They include: tarnishing Egypt’s image, accepting foreign money without government approval and embezzling funds from the European Union.

“These charges are transparently designed to obstruct independent non-governmental organisations from carrying out their legitimate activities, and from access to support from international funding institutions. Their impact has been to severely constrain the activities of local human rights defenders in Egypt,” Neil Hicks of the Washington-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said in a statement.

The European Commission announced after conducting its own investigations into the embezzlement charges that it found no evidence to support the charge and has “no cause for concern, financial or otherwise.” It has repeatedly pressed Egyptian prosecutors to drop the charge but to no avail.

In recent years, the Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak has come down hard on various groups it considers a threat to society and its regime, including Muslim extremists, secular thinkers and homosexuals.

“Human rights activists find themselves in court whenever they cross the government’s fluctuating red line,” said Farid Zahran, an outspoken pro-Palestinian activist whose own campaign landed him in police detention briefly.

Ibrahim claims he overstepped the “orange” line when he proceeded with plans for the IKCDS to monitor Egypt’s parliamentary elections and release reports on discrimination against the country’s Coptic Christian minority.

The government shut down the centre in the middle of a campaign aimed at increasing voter awareness and closed the Association for the Support of Women Voters, or Hoda Association, an affiliated non governmental organisation of which Ibrahim was the treasurer.

Local and international rights groups have objected to the trial being held in a state security court, which is usually reserved for terrorists, and have rejected the charges.

“We are following this case on the principle that we are against any military decree being used against any civilian,” Hisham Kassem, head of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) told Inter Press Service.

Defence lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of Military Decree No. 4 of 1992, which prohibits receiving donations from abroad without government approval and is one of the main charges brought against Ibrahim and his co-defendants.

Authorities have invoked it only once before – against rights activist Hafez Abu Sa’ada – following the publication of a report in 1998 on sectarian violence between Muslims and Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt.

Kassem is also critical of the prosecution’s charge that Ibrahim and his colleagues were disseminating false information about the internal situation in Egypt through faxes and videos prepared at the IKCDS.

“There is no such thing as tarnishing the image of Egypt, or any other country. You can only expose the wrong practices of a regime…as Dr. Ibrahim has done with his writing,” he adds.