Reporters Without Borders called for blogger Kareem Amer’s release today. Kareem is entering his sixth week of detention for his views, deemed “un-Islamic” by Al-Azhar University, where he was studying before the administration expelled him, and reported him to the authorities.
Tag: prisons
Nour’s saga continues
Mubarak’s regime, it seems, is planning to keep on trying Dr. Ayman Nour till he dies in prison.
Jailed Egypt politician questioned on new allegations
Aziz El-Kaissouni
CAIRO, Dec 17 (Reuters) – Imprisoned Egyptian politician Ayman Nour has been sent back to jail after being questioned by prosecutors on a number of new allegations, including defaming President Hosni Mubarak, his wife said on Sunday.
Gameela Ismail told Reuters Nour, 41, was also being questioned on suspicion of insulting religion and mocking God, among other charges.
Several months ago, Nour’s Ghad (Tomorrow) Party newspaper provoked an outcry for publishing a number of articles that were deemed offensive to religion.
Nour did not write the articles and publicly disavowed them, but his status as the chairman of the newspaper’s board means that he can be held legally liable.
His wife will also be questioned despite the fact that she has no official role at the newspaper, although she informally supervises its activities.
Nour, who came a distant second to Mubarak in last year’s presidential election, is serving a five-year term for filing forged papers to set up his Ghad Party in 2004. He says the charges were fabricated to drive him out of political life.
The U.S. government and human rights groups criticised the trial and sentencing of Nour, who campaigned against Mubarak on a liberal, secular platform.
Nour is scheduled to undergo cardiac catheterisation on Monday, to determine whether his heart condition will require stent implants or bypass surgery, Ismail said.
Stents are small tubes used to prop open arteries.
Nour, who is diabetic and dependent on insulin, has been bleeding from his eyelids for several days due to an overdose of anticoagulant prescribed by prison doctors in preparation for Monday’s procedure, his wife said.
He was scheduled to undergo the cardiac catheterisation last week, but was returned from hospital after being told the procedure required the personal approval of the interior minister, his wife said.
Nour’s lawyers have formally asked that he be released on medical grounds, but have received no response.
UPDATE: From Reuters:
Egypt opposition leader has heart tests under guard
CAIRO, Dec 19 – Imprisoned Egyptian politician Ayman Nour underwent heart tests under tight security and police kept his wife Gameela Ismail away from his hospital room.
An Amnesty International representative who was with Ismail outside the hospital on Monday said Ismail managed to speak to him for a few minutes only through a closed and blinded window.
Ismail later caught a glimpse of Nour from an ambulance window after police hurried him out though a back door of the Cairo hospital and started to drive him back to prison, Amnesty International’s Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui told Reuters.
“There were things that were really unnecessary. She (Ismail) just wanted to see her husband and make sure he was in good health,” said Sahraoui, who is deputy project director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Nour, who is serving a five-year jail term on fraud charges which he says were fabricated to force him out of politics, had the cardiac catheterisation procedure at Kasr el-Aini government hospital, Ismail told Reuters.
“They (police) refused to let us communicate with him. They even refused to let me in to pay the 700 pounds ($120),” said Ismail, who spent most of the day outside the hospital.
A photograph in the independent newspaper Al Masry Al Youm showed Nour, 42, lying in his hospital bed and smiling. Ismail said one of the patients in the same room took the picture.
The aim of the test was to find out whether Nour, who has a history of arterial problems, needs heart surgery or stents to hold his arteries open, she said. He has had the same procedure done several times and had arterial expansion in 2003.
Nour was the main challenger to President Hosni Mubarak in elections in September 2005, when Egypt had the first contested presidential elections in its long history.
A secular liberal, he came a distant second with about seven percent of the popular vote. Independent election monitors said irregularities were widespread.
Since his imprisonment in December last year and without his daily presence and leadership, his Ghad (Tomorrow) Party has lost much of its dynamism, political analysts say.
Nour and his colleagues say the authorities trumped up the charges against Nour because he was the most significant potential threat to a presidential bid by Mubarak’s son Gamal Mubarak, who is almost exactly the same age. Gamal and his father say they have no plan for Gamal to seek the presidency.
Rights watchdogs denounce Taba bombings trial
Great news to all those concerned with police brutality and justice in Egypt.
The Taba bombings trial–which witnessed harsh sentences of executions and prison terms based on confessions extracted from the suspects under torture–is coming under strong criticism from rights watchdogs inside Egypt and abroad.
Human Rights Watch denounced the trial in a statement:
Serious allegations of torture and forced confessions, as well as prolonged incommunicado detention and lack of consultation with counsel, raise significant doubts about the fairness of the trial, which Human Rights Watch monitored.
More importantly, the African Commission on Human Rights asked the Egyptian government to freeze the execution sentences:
Sentences of death were passed on the three defendants by the Egyptian State Security Emergency Court on 30 November. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and INTERIGHTS, the International Center for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, brought a complaint to the African Commission arguing a number of violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to which Egypt is a signatory. These include torture in detention, failure to meet fair trial standards and the absence of a right of appeal from a sentence of death.
The Commission has not yet ruled on the substance of the case, but has requested the Egyptian authorities to stay execution pending an urgent consideration of the complaint at its next session in the spring, 2007.
I’ve just spoken now with the mother of Osama al-Nakhlawi, one of the defendants sentenced to death. She did not know anything about the African Commission’s statement, so she was EUPHORIC… and is hoping Mubarak will not sign those death sentences. She also complained bitterly about denial of visits to her son for two months now. “I just want to see him,” she told me over the phone. “They will kill him, and I want to see him for the last time before they do that. This is tyranny. This is injustice. May God destroy their (police) homes as they destroyed ours.”
Amen.