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An Egyptian court on Wednesday handed a 15-year jail sentence to leading activist Alaa Abdel Fattah for violating a protest law, among other charges, Fattah’s lawyer said. 33-year-old Fattah became a symbol of the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2011 due to his prominent role in demonstrations and on social media. The court handed out 24 other people the same 15-year sentence on similar charges, in a move that sparked outrage among several human rights groups.
The sentencing comes only three days after Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took office as President, and almost a year after Sisi toppled the government of the Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first free elected President. Since the fall of Morsi, security forces have killed several hundreds of supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Most rights groups say that over 16,000 people have been arrested by security personnel in the past year. They also jailed secular activists like Fattah, raising concerns that the country is regressing back to the Mubarak reign, when any dissent was deemed risky.
Egypt’s protest law was passed last year, and heightened fears of a future without political freedom in the country. According to the law, which right groups say is very backward, the Interior Ministry has the right to ban a meeting which involves more than 10 people and is conducted in public.
Fattah was arrested over accusation of organizing a protest against a provision in the new constitution which allows military courts to pass sentences on civilians. He was out on bail, but was detained after the judge’s ruling, security sources said. Mona Seif, Fattah’s sister, wrote about him on her Facebook page, saying that authorities did not allow the defendants from attending the trial, as a consequence of which the defendants, under Egyptian law, had been given the maximum sentence possible. His father, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, a lawyer and the head of his legal team, said that the courtroom proceedings were a “trap” to arrest Alaa Abdel Fattah and the other defendants so that they could force a retrial with them in jail.