Twenty-one-year-old engineering student and blogger Ahmed Mostafa, arrested two weeks ago on charges of defaming the Egyptian Armed Forces, was declared innocent today.
Instead of a verdict at today’s military court hearing in the eastern Cairo district of Nasr City, Mostafa’s case was removed from the list of hearings, according to Hamdy el-Assiouty, Mostafa’s defense lawyer.
“This shows that the military establishment is smarter than the government and does not shy away from reversing a wrong decision. This is worthy of respect,” says Gamal Eid, director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information.
In February 2009, Mostafa posted a blog entry about a student who had been allegedly forced to resign from a military academy to make room for another applicant.
“Mostafa was summoned yesterday and was further interrogated about his motives for posting this information,” el-Assiouty said. Mostafa’s case was dropped after he was instructed not to repeat such posts in the future.
“The military tribunal realized that such a case is beyond its mandate. The Military Courts Law applies to military personnel, conscripted citizens, or people who truly disclose secrets about the armed forces,” said el-Assiouty. He predicts that Mostafa will be released from prison today.
It remains unclear whether pressure from human rights organizations affected the court’s decision, but many rights watchdogs condemned the trial. On 5 March, the London-based Amnesty International issued a press release crticizing the trial. “Ahmed Mostafa has been prosecuted solely for exercising peacefully his right to freedom of expression on his blog. He is now facing bogus charges that reveal the determination of the authorities to control the Egyptian blogosphere, which has become a pocket of free expression in the country,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa deputy director.
“The use of military courts to try bloggers is a shocking new development. Egypt has consistently been criticised by UN human rights bodies for this misuse of military justice. Rather than addressing the unfairness of trials of civilians by such courts, the Egyptian authorities are now seeking to widen their use."
Military courts were established in Egypt in 1966 under the Code of Military Justice.
Eid hopes that the government will follow suit and release bloggers arrested for expressing their opinion freely on the internet. Three high-profile cases have recieved much attention from the press and human rights organizations. Mossad Abu Fajr has been imprisoned for writing online about human rights violations against Bedouins in Sinai; Hani Nazeer has been in administrative detention since 2008 for publishing blog posts deemed insulting to Islam; and Kareem Amer has been serving a four-year sentence since 2007 for blogging about sectarian violence and criticizing President Hosni Mubarak.
