Egyptian Activists to Stand Trial for Protesting Ban on Protests
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Version 0 of 1. A prosecutor in Cairo plans to charge 23 opposition activists with violating a new law banning unsanctioned protests for attending a rally last Saturday against the ban. The defendants were detained after their peaceful march was attacked by a group of men in civilian clothes who seemed to arrive with the police and hurled rocks and bottles at the protesters. They were also accused of “stirring chaos,” vandalism, resisting arrest and possessing “arms,” or fireworks, according to Aswat Masriya, an Egyptian news site sponsored by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Seven of the detainees are women, including “20-year-old activist Sanaa Seif, whose brother Alaa Abd El Fattah is serving a 15-year sentence for similar charges, and human rights researcher Yara Sallam,” the independent Cairene news site Mada Masr reported. Ms. Sallam, 28, is a lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a blogger, who writes in English as well as Arabic. She explained her work to defend the right of women to engage in public debate in Egypt in a video interview recorded last year, after she won an African human rights prize. The authorities “interrogated Sallam extensively about the work of the organization” for which she works, Human Rights Watch said in a statement deploring the arrests. “The detention of Yara Sallam,” said Joe Stork, a regional director for Human Rights Watch, “raises concerns that authorities want to intimidate and silence Egyptian rights activists who have bravely criticized this law and other rights violations that have become routine since the military takeover last July.” Ms. Seif comes from a family of prominent activists. Her brother, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as simply @Alaa, was sentenced in absentia this month for attending a protest last year. Her sister, Mona Seif, founded the group No Military Trials for Civilians. Their father, Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamed, once ran the Cairo-based Hisham Mubarak Law Center and spent five years in jail in the 1980s for his opposition to Egypt’s autocratic government. And their mother, Laila Soueif, is a professor at Cairo University who has a long history of activism. Members of that family and other supporters of the detainees staged a small sit-in outside a courthouse in Heliopolis from Tuesday night until Wednesday, documented on Twitter by the activist blogger Kareem Farid and Ms. Seif’s cousin, Omar Robert Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton also shared a photograph of his cousin’s bedroom door to give a sense of how many causes she has supported in the three years since Egypt’s young revolutionaries forced former President Hosni Mubarak from power. The detainees are expected to appear in court on Sunday, Aswat Masriya reported. |