Egypt's former president Mohamed Morsi sentenced to 20 years in prison

[سيف الله]

Salaam

An update on the situation in Egypt

Cairo court’s sentence over killing of hundreds of protesters in 2012 comes as ousted leader faces two other trials

Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi has been sentenced to 20 years in prison over the killing of demonstrators outside his palace in 2012, the first verdict to be issued against the country’s first freely elected leader.

Morsi, who was elected president the year after Egypt’s 2011 revolution, was removed by the military in 2013 after an acrimonious year in office. Tuesday’s verdict stemmed from deaths during violent clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and protesters who opposed Morsi in December 2012.

The verdict and sentence were issued during a brief hearing in a crowded courtroom in a police academy on the outskirts of Cairo. The defendants included several senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the same verdict, Morsi and 14 co-defendants were acquitted of a murder charge for which they could have faced the death penalty. The former president was convicted of inciting his supporters to use violence and detain and torture opposition demonstrators.

His supporters were outraged. “His trial has been a travesty of justice, which has been scripted and controlled by the government and entirely unsupported by evidence,” Amr Darrag, a senior figure from the Muslim Brotherhood and a former minister under Morsi, said in a statement in Istanbul reported by Reuters. “They want to pass a life sentence for democracy in Egypt.”

Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and north Africa, Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, said: “This verdict shatters any remaining illusion of independence and impartiality in Egypt’s criminal justice system … Convicting Mohamed Morsi despite fundamental flaws in the legal process and what seems to be at best flimsy evidence produced in court under a gag order, utterly undermines this verdict.”

The prisoners appeared inside a metal and glass cage in the courtroom, dressed in white and blue jumpsuits. Throughout the short proceedings, they made the four-finger salute used by Islamists to commemorate the 2013 killings of hundreds of Morsi’s supporters in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, Cairo.

Those deaths took place during a clampdown on Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in the weeks after the military takeover. Thousands of Islamists and other opponents of the new government have been jailed in the nearly two years since Morsi was forced from power.

As the verdicts were read, the defendants shouted but their words could not be heard because of the thick panes of glass installed after a defiant Morsi declared himself the rightful president during earlier sessions.

An appeal against Tuesday’s verdict is expected. British legal advisers to Morsi’s Freedom and Justice party claimed the trial had been manipulated by the military regime in Cairo and that his 20-year prison sentence would be raised with the African commission on human and peoples’ rights.

Tayab Ali of ITN Solicitors in London, who leads the international legal team, said: “President Morsi’s trial falls far below the standards expected of a fair trial. These political show trials have become the hallmark of General Sisi’s regime.

“The judiciary in Egypt are seriously failing their people by endorsing the illegal acts of the military regime. The court presiding over Morsi’s trial failed to consider strong evidence prepared by my legal team that President Morsi’s detention was illegal and that evidence was being fabricated.

“We intend to bring the massive failure of Egypt’s legal system to the attention of the African commission. It is imperative that the international community takes decisive action to bring an end to the burgeoning human rights crisis in Egypt.”

Morsi is also on trial separately for escaping from prison during the 2011 popular uprising, espionage and conspiring to commit terrorism. Verdicts in two of the cases are expected in May.

Morsi is being held at a high-security prison near Alexandria. His incarceration there followed four months of detention at an undisclosed location.

In past sessions, Morsi and most of the defendants turned their backs on the court when the judge, Ahmed Youssef, played video recordings of the clashes outside the palace in 2012.

They took place during protests against decrees granting Morsi expanded powers and an Islamist-backed draft constitution. On 5 December 2012 hundreds of Brotherhood supporters broke up a protest camp outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace in Cairo. In the violence that followed, at least 10 people died, most of them Brotherhood supporters.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/egypts-ex-president-mohamed-morsi-jailed-protest-deaths-muslim-brotherhood

[Karl]

First rule in leadership is to have the military and police on your side by whatever means necessary. Morsi failed to do this.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Further comment.

The Guardian view on the sentence just passed on Mohamed Morsi

Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi was sentenced this week, along with other Muslim Brotherhood officials, to 20 years in prison over the killing of demonstrators outside the presidential palace in 2012. He now faces other charges that could lead to further prison time or to the death penalty. What happened at that demonstration, called to protest against a decree that his decisions would be immune to judicial oversight until a new constitutional charter was in place, has always been unclear and remains so after a trial from which the press was largely excluded. The probability is that there was both provocation and a loss of control on both sides, compounded by the refusal of the security forces to intervene. It is perhaps telling that the majority of those who died were supporters of the Brotherhood.

What is clear, however, is that the case is part of the relentless judicial pursuit of Mr Morsi and his colleagues by the new regime in Egypt, a pursuit quite unmatched by an equivalent determination to hold to account those guilty of serious offences on the anti-Morsi side. Their sins are excused or obfuscated, and the trial of Mr Morsi is only one of many in which due process appears to have been cast aside, the overall objective appearing to be to criminalise an entire political movement. A blanket terrorist label has thus been slapped on the Brotherhood, and nearly all its leaders are in detention. But they are not the only victims. Civil society organisations have been closed, the press is controlled, and journalists have been jailed. Secular opponents of the government, including figures who initially supported the coup against Mr Morsi by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in 2013, also find themselves harassed and persecuted.

That Egypt under Mr Sisi is now a worse dictatorship than it was under Hosni Mubarak is acknowledged to be one of the unhappiest outcomes of an Arab spring that became an Arab nightmare. Egypt’s political regression is a different sort of disaster than Syria’s terrible civil war or the chaos in Libya, but it is a disaster nonetheless. Yet the steady rehabilitation of the Sisi regime continues apace. Faint lip service is paid by the United States and other western countries to democratic issues. But the American military aid that sustains the Egyptian military establishment flows almost as freely as it did before, conditionality having been all but abandoned. Economic relations are pursued, as shown last month when the US secretary of state, John Kerry, was guest of honour at an investors conference. And Egypt is sought as an ally against Islamic State and in the coalition opposing the Houthis in Yemen.

It is true that many Egyptians were deeply worried about the direction they believed President Morsi was taking the country, and true, too, that the Brotherhood did not have overwhelming popular support. Yet the fact remains that a democratically elected government was removed by force and that the regime that has come in its stead has many repellent features. It does not deserve the easy acquiescence that the United States and some European countries are now extending to it.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/guardian-view-sentence-mohamed-morsi-west-should-protest