Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pardoned several prisoners, including prominent Egyptian activist Ahmed Douma, on Saturday, August 19, according to state television. The young man is a figure in the 2011 popular uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak, and since 2013 he has been serving a 15-year sentence. A new signal from the current president sent less than a year before the presidential elections.
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Activist and blogger Ahmed Douma, prominent in the pro-democracy revolt that ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, was pardoned by Egyptian President Abdelfatah al-Sisi, along with a number of others with final sentences.
Like other prominent Egyptian activists, Douma had been jailed under the Mubarak regime, the later ruling military council, former president Mohamed Mursi and Al Sisi.
“Egyptian President Abdelfatah al-Sisi used his constitutional authority by issuing the decision to pardon some who were tried with a final sentence, including Ahmed Saad Duma,” the official Egyptian news agency Mena reported, but did not provide details. how many prisoners were pardoned.
Background
Duma protested against Mubarak, the military council created later between 2011 and 2012, and against the deposed Islamist president Mohamed Mursi (2012-2013). She is one of the familiar faces of the young people who led the Egyptian “revolution” and was in prison, as Alaa Abdelfatah is currently.
He was first sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly committing “acts of violence” outside the Council of Ministers headquarters in Cairo in 2011, though his sentence was commuted to fifteen years. In 2014, he was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting judges in another trial, and in 2015, the Egyptian Court of Cassation handed down a final sentence of three years in prison against Duma for demonstrating without authorization and assaulting the police.
With all this, Ahmed Douma, 37, published a collection of poems, “Curly” (“curly”, in English), from papers passed discreetly to lawyers. This book was exhibited at the Cairo Book Fair in 2021.
The organization of Young Political Parties thanked Al Sisi in a statement for issuing this presidential pardon “in the framework of his response to the appeal of the National Dialogue Council and the political forces.”
Messages that sound like elections
This pardon comes at a time when Cairo is actively carrying out a National Dialogue aimed at discussing the issues that bother this country of 105 million inhabitants, in the midst of an economic crisis and where the opposition has been muzzled for a decade.
This committee is made up of members of different political forces, including opponents, to seek a consensus on various issues in order to guide the Arab country in matters in which they were being criticized such as economic management and human rights. Critics have dismissed the measures as cosmetic and say the arrests have continued.
A month ago, Al Sisi pardoned the Christian activist Patrick Zaki, who was sentenced the day before to three years in prison, and the human rights lawyer Mohamed el Baqer, behind bars since 2019, in an unprecedented pardon to important figures of the Egyptian civil society.
With Reuters, EFE and AFP
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