Written by
Federica Zoja

 

Freedom of opinion is more and more the target of the Egyptian government. An Amnesty International report on the Arab Republic of Egypt has denounced two recent cases, involving the blogger Abdel Karim Sulaiman Amer and  Tal’at Sadat, nephew of the president assassinated on October 6th 1981.

Rights trampled over. Amer, former student of the Al Azhar university mosque, has been arrested and is still in prison for criticizing Cairo university and the Egyptian religious authorities. Tal’at Sadat, former member of the Egyptian parliament, has been brought to a summary trial  “for insulting  and spreading rumours about the armed forces”. On his uncle’s death anniversary Tal’at claimed that some army officers and president Hosni Mubarak himself were involved in the assassination which was actually committed by six Islamic fundamentalists.
At the moment, blogger Amer is still in prison, after a first four-day detention for “incitement to hatred towards Muslims” and for “slanderous statements about the president”: in virtue of an emergency law in use since Anwar Sadat’s assassination, detention can be extended endlessly and citizens can be judged by court martial.
Tal’at Sadat has been deprived of his parliamentary immunity and sentenced to one year’s hard labour.
Also the report of Reporters without Borders (Rsf) on the so-called “Internet enemies” is in line with Amnesty International’s denunciation. This year’s list compared to last year’s one shows that Libya,  Maldives, and Nepal have left the scene while Egypt  has been included as one of the countries where censorship is used heavily.

Free to be silent. This negative development in freedom of opinion in Egypt is particularly worrying if we consider that just last year the North African country was under the spotlight of the international community because of presidential elections held on September 7th  2005 and of legislative elections held the following November. Under the pressure of both the United States and the European Union, Egypt granted more freedom to the press during the electoral campaign and showed a cautious willingness to involve the opposition in the political debate. If the Rfs’s report is well-founded, we may suppose that, as soon as the election time was over, the Egyptian authorities  have not only retraced their steps, but they have even started a harsh repression of the Internet which is, for its own nature, totally free.
And the Internet seems to be one of the priorities of the Egyptian Big Brother since a recent decision of  an administrative court of the Council of State has stated that the authorities can shut down any website considered as a threat to “national security”.