| Lawyers for Lawyers welcomes the news that Mohamed El-Baqer, an Egyptian human rights defender and lawyer and Director of Adalah Centre for Rights and Freedoms, received a presidential pardon on 19 July 2023 in criminal case 1228 of 2021. Mr. El-Baqer has been detained since 2019 and was serving a prison sentence for “spreading false news” and “belonging to a terrorist group”. Vague and unfounded charges that have been broadly used to criminalise dissenting voices in Egypt.
For years, the Egyptian authorities ignored international calls for the release of all human rights defenders arbitrarily detained in Egypt, including public statements by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders and two European Parliament resolutions on the situation of human rights defenders in Egypt. |
