Sentencing of US-Egyptian activist cripples rights work in Egypt

By Peter King

CAIRO (AFP): As U.S.-Egyptian rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim started a seven year jail sentence for defaming Egypt and receiving illegal foreign funding, colleagues and foreign diplomats said Tuesday his trial has had a crippling effect on human rights work here.

Embattled human rights activists said that since Ibrahim's arrest on June 30 last year they have found it impossible to obtain funds without violating one of the same laws Ibrahim was convicted under Monday.

The U.S. State Department reacted strongly to the sentencing, saying it was "deeply troubled" by the outcome of a trial on which it had repeatedly expressed concern.

Meanwhile, diplomats who have observed the trial said the conviction of a human rights activist for the first time under Military Order Number Four of 1992 had muddied the legal waters and made rights groups wary of taking funds.

The military order makes it a criminal offense to receive funds from foreign or local parties without permission from the ministry of social affairs.

"All human rights organizations in Egypt are now threatened with that law which carries a minimum sentence of seven years," the director of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR), Hafez Abu Saada, told AFP.

"Now they won't be able to get any funding; they will be threatened with closure or suspension and won't be able to offer their services or contest (human rights) violations," Abu Saada said.

Ibrahim himself told AFP in court Monday, after hearing the sentences against him and colleagues from his Ibn Khaldun Center for democracy and human rights, that he believed the trial was "politically motivated."

The group of 28 defendants were all convicted on charges linked to "publishing false reports abroad" and "spreading rumors" about Egypt's internal affairs, as well as obtaining unauthorized funding.

Sociology professor Ibrahim has charged that the case was mounted against him for his work in support of democratic elections, as well as standing up for women's rights and those of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority.

The center had planned to monitor last year's legislative elections -- which ended up being marred by violence and charges of government manipulation -- but the case prevented them.

Abu Saada was also accused three years ago of violating the military order, but the case against him has been suspended "until the time is right," he said.

His center has been reduced to a skeleton staff of mainly volunteers after being refused permission to obtain funding by the ministry of social affairs, he added.

"The impact has already been felt since his (Ibrahim's) arrest last summer, and it's just going to continue," said Canadian diplomat Isabelle Martin, who attended some of Ibrahim's trial hearings as an observer.

"I think it makes them (rights activists) very worried and very uncomfortable, and its difficult to define for them what's acceptable and what's not in terms of receiving funding," she said.

Martin described the Monday's sentences as "a very harsh decision."

Diplomats from the European Union, whose MEDA Democracy Program was one of the sources of funding Ibrahim was accused of having received without the authorities' permission, would not comment on the matter.

At a time when anti-western feeling in Egypt is higher than usual as a result of perceived western support for Israel against the Palestinians, Martin said the image of western countries had suffered further as a result of negative coverage of the trial in the Egyptian press.

Ibrahim's lawyers will try to contest the high state security court's sentences on procedural grounds through the court of cassation, the only possible recourse for verdicts handed down by the court, which does not accept ordinary appeals.