Amid the coronavirus panic we mustn’t forget this is a perfect time for less savoury regimes to do this sort of thing…
ABC News (USA) reports.
An Egyptian court has sentenced a prominent human rights lawyer and former lawmaker to one year in prison for his conviction on charges that rights advocates have decried as baseless and politically motivated
An Egyptian court Tuesday sentenced a prominent human rights lawyer and former lawmaker to a year in prison for his conviction on charges that rights advocates have decried as baseless and politically motivated.
The judge in Cairo’s misdemeanors court found Zyad el-Elaimy guilty of “deliberately spreading fake news.” He was also fined 20,000 Egyptian pounds (around $1,270).
El-Elaimy has appealed the ruling and will remain in detention until a hearing on April 7. He also faces charges in a separate case of conspiring with an outlawed group to commit crimes, a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has banned as a terrorist organization. Police arrested el-Elaimy over those accusations last summer after he met with political parties and opposition lawmakers to hash out how to run in the 2020 parliamentary elections.
A vocal critic of el-Sissi’s government, el-Elaimy is a leading activist in the secular Egyptian Social Democratic Party. He served as a member of parliament after the 2011 uprising that toppled autocrat President Hosni Mubarak.
The global rights watchdog Amnesty International condemned Tuesday’s decision as the latest sign of “the Egyptian authorities’ total intolerance” of dissent.
