The United States said on Monday it was deeply troubled that an Egyptian court had sentenced a prominent Egyptian-American activist to seven years in jail for defaming Egypt in his civil rights reports, said Reuters.
Court sources said a state security court found Saadeddin Ibrahim, a 62-year-old sociology professor, guilty of all charges against him when the trial began in November.
They include illegally receiving funds from the European Commission to monitor parliamentary elections, offering bribes to forge official documents, and defaming Egypt in rights reports about relations between Christians and Muslims.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: "We're still gathering all the facts about the court's decision. Based on these initial reports, though, we're deeply troubled about the outcome.
"We've been expressing all along our concerns about the process that resulted in this sentence."
Human rights activist and publisher Hisham Kassem told Reuters that Egypt's Court of Cassation, which can revoke the verdict on procedural grounds, was likely to throw out the sentence.
The three-judge panel of the Supreme Security Court pronounced the sentence 90 minutes after defense lawyers, who were still submitting briefs, had finished their summations. The judges had been expected to deliberate for several days if not months over the thousands of pages of evidence submitted, said the New York Times newspaper.
"This case is a farce," said Negad Borai, the former chairman of the Group for Developing Democracy, a shuttered civil rights organization. "Egypt does not want real democracy. The state wants us as puppets in its big show of paper democracy, and if we decide otherwise, it knocks us down."
Ibrahim, who holds both American and Egyptian citizenship, along with 27 others linked to his Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies — closed by the government last June — were given sentences ranging from seven years to one year.
The charges included disseminating false information harmful to Egypt, accepting foreign donations without government permission and embezzling donated money.
Ibrahim pleaded not guilty to all charges.
"This is politically motivated and the sentence is politically dictated," Ibrahim told the Associated Press on a mobile phone as the police escorted him from the courtroom. "It is a struggle and it will go on. I do not regret anything I stood for."
The specific reason that Ibrahim was singled out for arrest and prosecution has baffled rights activists here and abroad, said the New York Times.
The center, which Ibrahim founded some 12 years ago, had delved into sensitive topics like electoral fraud and tensions between Egypt's Muslim majority and Christian minority.
In addition, Ibrahim was an outspoken advocate of independent elections, and the center had planned to monitor parliamentary elections last fall.
Ibrahim also wrote a satirical magazine article about Arab leaders grooming their sons to succeed them, which mentioned the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Mubarak has said in interviews that he had nothing to do with the case, and Egyptian government officials in general refuse to comment when contacted by the paper.
At one point last year, Osama Al Baz, a senior presidential aide, denied that the charges were politically motivated, saying that Ibrahim was being investigated for violating the law.
Ibrahim's wife, Barbara, an American academic working in Egypt, staggered from the courthouse in the arms of supporters and expressed shock at the verdict, said the paper.
"Never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would be a long prison sentence," she said – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
