On
this date, 28 April 2014 amid the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état, An Egyptian judge has
sentenced 683 alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death,
including the group's supreme guide, Mohamed
Badie, and confirmed the death sentences of 37 of 529 alleged supporters
previously condemned. Mohamed Elmessiry, an Amnesty International researcher monitoring
the cases, said they "lacked basic fair trial guarantees". The
defendants from the first case whose death sentences were not upheld were each
sentenced to 25 years in prison.
I
do not support the mass death sentences as I prefer a fair trial with massive judicial
safeguards and with extreme carefulness.
 |
|
Egypt Mass Death Sentence
|
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/04/egyptian-court-sentences-683-people-death-201442875510336199.html
Egyptian court sentences 683 people to death
Amid crackdown on opposition, judge also confirms death sentences for 37 alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
Minya, Egypt - An Egyptian judge has sentenced 683
alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death, including the group's supreme
guide, Mohamed Badie, and confirmed the death sentences of 37 of 529 alleged supporters previously condemned.
Outside
the courtroom on Monday, when news of the sentences broke, families of the
accused began to scream and several women fainted, falling to the ground.
Mohamed
Elmessiry, an Amnesty International researcher monitoring the cases, said they
"lacked basic fair trial guarantees".
The
defendants from the first case whose death sentences were not upheld were each
sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Many
of the lawyers for the accused boycotted the hearing, demanding that the judge
be recused and calling him a "butcher".
Mohamed
Abdel Waheb, a lawyer who represents 25 of the defendants, said the verdict was
handed down in a court session lasting less than five minutes.
Previously,
he said, the single session in the trial lasted just four hours, during which
the judge refused to listen to any arguments from the defence.
Abdel
Nasser Hassanien, standing outside the courtroom, said five of his relatives were
among those sentenced to die, including his brother, Ahmed Hassenein Abdelatty,
22.
"Of
the five only one is related to the Muslim Brotherhood, and he didn't do
anything," he said.
Global attention
Judge
Saeed Youssef first attracted international condemnation and prompted an outcry
from human-rights groups after he handed down the initial sentence for the 528
defendants on March 24, following a brief trial marked by irregularities.
On
Monday he reversed 492 of those 529 death sentences, commuting most of them to
life in prison.
Among
those freshly sentenced to death today was Badie, the supreme guide of the
Muslim Brotherhood - the group's most senior leader.
He
is among 77 of 683 defendants in custody; the remainder were tried in absentia
and have an automatic right to a retrial.
Egyptian
law requires that death sentences are confirmed by the presiding judge after a
comment has been invited from the Grand Mufti of Al Azhar, the country's
leading religious official.
The
Mufti's opinion to the judge is secret.
The
guilty verdict and death sentences are still subject to appeal at the Court of
Appeal.
"The
case killed the credibility of the Egyptian judicial system," said
Elmessiry of Amnesty International.
The
violence of which the defendants are accused took place on August 14 last year
as news reached Minya governorate that police had launched the deadly clearance
of two sit-ins in Cairo, held by supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi,
who had recently been ousted after mass protests against his rule.
Crowds
in Minya and elsewhere in southern Egypt, apparently supporters of Morsi,
attacked police stations and churches, accusing Christians of having supported
his overthrow.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/06/05/commentary/world-commentary/mass-death-sentences-now-part-life-egypt/#.Vx3ownoixNh
Mass death sentences now a part of life in Egypt
by Omar Ashour
CAIRO – Mass death sentences are usually
associated with regimes like those of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis or Pol Pot’s Khmer
Rouge. But Egypt’s military rulers have now joined the ranks of such regimes,
staging circus-like trials in which the outcome is foreordained. One such
trial, in March 2014, produced 529 death sentences; another, in April, yielded
683 death sentences. And the trend shows no signs of slowing.
Last
month, 107 people — including Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected
president — were handed death sentences for their alleged role in a mass
“prison break” during the January 2011 uprising against former President Hosni
Mubarak.
Morsi
was also accused of “colluding with foreign militants” — that is, Hezbollah and
Hamas — in order to free political prisoners in Egypt.
Soon
after, the six defendants in the “Arab Sharkas” case — who were handed death
sentences in October 2014 for allegedly attacking security posts — were
executed, despite a local and international outcry against the flawed trial.
According
to Ahmed Helmi, a lawyer for four of the six men, the government wanted to
“send a message following Morsi’s verdict” that it would carry out such
sentences. His clients and the others, he concluded, were just “scapegoats.”
Overall,
civilian courts have handed down more than 1,000 death sentences since Egypt’s
military overthrew Morsi in July 2013. The profiles of the “convicts” raise
eyebrows: Emad Shahin, for example, is a world-renowned academic who has taught
at Harvard and the American University in Cairo; Sondos Asem is a promising
young scholar and political activist.
Making
matters worse, extra-judicial killings by the security services and elements in
the military are rampant. The most dramatic of these episodes accompanied the
coup in July 2013, when Egyptian police and army opened fire on crowds
protesting Morsi’s ouster in Cairo’s Rab’a Square, killing more than 1,000
protesters in less than 10 hours.
More
recently, Islam Atito, an engineering student at Cairo’s Ain Shams University
who supported the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, was found dead in the desert on
the outskirts of Cairo. Egypt’s interior ministry claimed that Atito had been
involved in the “assassination” of a police officer and was killed in a
firefight with security forces during a raid on his “hideout.”
But
according to the student union of the university’s engineering faculty — whose
members collectively resigned in protest against the killing — Atito was
arrested during a final exam on the university campus.
The
government, it is claimed, had Atito abducted and murdered in response to his
activism. As a human-rights lawyer monitoring the case notes, this is just one
of several such cases — none of which is being seriously investigated.
These
judicial and extra-judicial killings reflect the depth of Egypt’s current
crisis. The “hawks” who control the security and military establishments seem
intent on restoring a Mubarak-style regime, but with one key difference: they
believe that Mubarak did too little to repress the opposition.
For
Egypt’s current leadership, the brutal tactics employed by the likes of Libya’s
Moammar Gadhafi and Syria’s Bashar Assad are more likely to work in the
Egyptian context than in those countries. After all, the probability of
international intervention (as in Libya) is nil, and the likelihood of a
full-fledged armed revolution (as in Syria) is extremely limited.
But
relying on force to subdue dissent in a country where 70 percent of the
population is under the age of 30 will be a major challenge, if not resulting
in a bloodbath.
The
brutal policies of Egypt’s hawks have also transformed the opposition. At a 2013
sit-in protesting Morsi’s ouster, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide,
Mohamed Badie, declared, in what became a rallying cry for the movement, “Our
peacefulness is stronger than their bullets.” But, with Badie having since been
sentenced to death in multiple cases (including one related to attacks on
police stations in the southern province of Minya), the phrase has become the
subject of bitter mockery among young political activists, including
Brotherhood members.
Rassd,
a Brotherhood-affiliated news website, recently published a letter by the
group’s former secretary-general, Mahmoud Ghozlan, asserting that the
“revolution” will continue to be nonviolent.
But
it also published harsh criticism of Ghozlan’s position by young Brotherhood
activists — a notable development for an organization in which dissent is
rarely publicized.
In
fact, anger among younger members has become so acute that the Brotherhood has
allegedly changed some 65 percent of its leadership, according to Ahmed
Abdel-Rahman, the head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Administrative Office
Abroad (a new body that organizes the thousands of Brotherhood members now in
exile).
The
organization has also adopted a harsher line, having publicly stated that the
“reformist” approach that its government took after winning parliamentary and
presidential elections in 2011 and 2012 was “wrong,” and that excluding
non-Islamist revolutionary youth groups was a “major mistake.”
Given
Egypt’s mass death sentences, extrajudicial violence and the dominance of hawks
in the security and the military establishments, together with the rhetorical,
behavioral and organizational changes within the Muslim Brotherhood, the
chances of reconciliation are fading by the day. In an environment in which
“compromise” is regarded as a dirty word, Egypt’s future appears to be far from
bright.
Omar Ashour is senior lecturer in security studies at the
University of Exeter and an associate fellow at Chatham House in London. He is
the author of “The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist
Movements.” © Project Syndicate, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment