The usually bustling entrance of the New Broadcasting House in London was still filled to the brim with people this morning, but for one minute they were completely silent.
BBC staff, joined by fellow journalists from around the world, stood in silent protest at 9:41 am, exactly 24 hours from the sentencing of three Al Jazeera journalists to prison in Egypt. Peter Greste and Mohamed Fahmy were each handed down seven-year sentences, while Baher Mohamed was given ten years.
The three journalists were found guilty on Monday for spreading false news by a court in Cairo. Ten other journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton and Dominic Kane, and Rena Netjes, a correspondent for Dutch newspaper Parool, were also sentenced in absentia to ten years.
The silent protest was orchestrated in hopes of fighting against these unjust practices and to raise awareness of the dangers and censorship many international journalists face.
BBC Director of News, James Harding, stood up and addressed the group: “They are not just robbing three innocent men of their freedom, but intimidating journalists and inhibiting free speech.”
The protestors held signs that read #FreeJournalism and #FreeAJStaff, and covered their mouths with tape in order to illustrate their frustration with the trial verdict.
Sana Safi, a presenter for BBC Pashto TV News, said: “When I heard the verdict, I was in shock because I’m from Afghanistan and we have seen more media freedom in the last few years, and I wasn’t expecting anything like that from a country like Egypt.”
Their looks were determined and their heads were held high as cameras flashed and captured the intense moment. Cowardice was not an option.
Nasidi Yahaya, a social media producer from BBC Hausa, said: “The verdict was so unfair, these guys were just doing their job. Journalists should not be silenced like this.”
The journalists from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and other news organisations standing together in solidarity will also be sending a letter calling on the Egyptian president to intervene in the situation.
The sentencing of Al Jazeera journalists today took Michelle Betz back to her own trial.
Just over a year ago I was awoken around 5am in Washington by a call from my Egyptian colleague. “Guilty,” he breathed. “We are all guilty”. I could hear the shock in his voice. I couldn’t yet feel my own shock.
We were defendants in the NGO trial in which 43 people working for four US and one German NGOs were accused of charges including operating without a licence and bringing foreign funds into the country. There were so many ironies about the case, the trial, and the charges; so many outrages; so many injustices. There were many, many parallels with what is happening now with the Al Jazeera journalists.
There was little international noise around our “trial”. And that is the one thing that has been different with the Al Jazeera trial – at least there has been no silence.
At the time I was working with the International Center for Journalists, from Washington DC. Judicial officials didn’t even have my full name, but there I was number 39 on the charge document.
I knew full well one year ago that we would be found guilty despite the multitude of assurances from all corners: the NGOs, the US State Department, the lawyers – all tried to assure us that this was all political (between the US and Egypt) and that this would “all go away”. Of course, logically, this should have all gone away. Just as with the Al Jazeera case, logically, it never should have happened. Logically, we, as they, should have been found innocent.
But dealing with the Egyptian judicial system is anything but logical.
In neither case was there any evidence and in neither trial did the prosecution have any legitimate case. But that was beside the point. They didn’t need evidence. They didn’t need a case. All they needed to do was follow the directive from on high and read the verdict: guilty.
I lived in Egypt for three years and I can never go back. If I did I would be immediately imprisoned.
Some have expressed surprise at the speed with which today’s verdict was rendered asking how the judge could possibly have written his judgment in so short a time. He didn’t. Instead, it’s highly likely that the judgment was already written six months ago. The judge was simply doing what he was told. I too would have worn sunglasses to court today; I too would have dragged my feet getting to work for surely there was some weight on his conscience.
So what now? The Egyptians learned from our case. At least in the NGO case none of us were imprisoned, though Egypt did pursue some of us through Interpol. The one thing the US did was to get all Americans (save one hero, Robert Becker, who refused to leave his Egyptian colleagues facing trial alone) first to the US Embassy in Cairo (where they stayed for days) and then finally flew them out in the middle of the night after some backroom deal was worked out with Egyptian officials.
And the Egyptian establishment has learned from this. They learned not to allow bail to prevent defendants leaving Egypt. They learned that the US (and the international community at large) didn’t care and that there would be no repercussions even if American citizens were convicted and sentenced to five years of hard labor. They learned that even the media didn’t care.
But on that last point they miscalculated – they didn’t realise that there is a tribe of journalism, which does not suffer injustice and attacks on its own. And that is our hope at this point – that we raise our voices, we continue to speak the truth, we continue to point to injustices, including injustices wrought on our tribe. For if we are silenced, then we all face injustice.
Yes, of course there was no evidence and of course the prosecution had no case. And so today we find ourselves one year on watching in horror as three Al Jazeera journalists are convicted and sentenced to 7-10 year prison sentences and those convicted in absentia to an even lengthier sentence (just like those convicted in absentia in the NGO trial, such as myself, who received longer sentences).
And so while my colleagues were shocked by our verdict one year ago, I was not. And if we were found guilty then so too would our Al Jazeera colleagues. There was a message to be sent.
But the convictions should be no surprise. Rule of law in Egypt as always been tough to find but almost any remaining semblance of it disappeared with the coup of 2013.
A chilling message sent by award-winning photojournalist Mosa’ab El Shamy via his Twitter account on Monday filled his 41,000 online followers with dread. Alerting them that his brother, reporter Abdullah El Shamy, had been “removed from his prison cell and taken to an unknown location”, Mosa’ab added that he was “still trying to find out more.”
Abdullah, who works as a journalist with the Arabic-language Al Jazeera (AJ) Misr Mubasher Channel, has been detained at Cairo’s Torah prison since August. He was arrested outside the Raba’a El Adaweya Mosque in Cairo’s eastern residential neighbourhood of Nasr City while filming the forced dispersal of a sit-in by supporters of toppled Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. At least 600 protesters were killed and thousands more were injured in a single day of violence when security forces stormed the pro-Morsi encampment on August 14 .
Mosa’ab’s Twitter post provoked an angry outcry from hundreds of internet activists who demanded that the Egyptian authorities “immediately disclose the whereabouts of the 26 year-old AJ detainee.” The fact that Abdullah has been on hunger strike since January 27–and had reportedly lost a third of his body weight–further fueled concerns over his disappearance and ailing health.
“If they can let a prisoner on hunger strike like Abdullah El Shamy just vanish in Egypt, what does Foreign Minister Fahmy’s talk of ‘due process’ really mean?” asked Jonathan Moremi, a journalist with the independent Egyptian paper Daily News Egypt.
On a recent visit to the United States, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy told US Secretary of State John Kerry that the country’s courts were “independent of the government.” He insisted that a “due process” was allowed in all court cases, leading to “fair decisions” by the judges. His statements came in response to criticism from US officials and international rights groups of an April court decision sentencing 683 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death for their role in protests last year against the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi. Kerry called the mass death sentences a “dangerous development.” Amnesty International, meanwhile, said “the Egyptian judiciary risked becoming a part of the authorities’ repressive machinery.”
In a blog titled “Where is Abdullah El Shamy?” posted on her website Wednesday, prominent Egyptian blogger Zeinobia said that blood samples taken by Abdullah’s family had shown he was “on the verge of kidney failure.” She also reminded readers that “journalism is not a crime.”
Abdullah is one of 17 journalists currently imprisoned in Egypt and one of four detainees working for the Al Jazeera news network , according to a recent report released by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists , CPJ. Sixty five journalists have been detained since the military takeover of the country in July 2013, the CPJ report adds. Analysts say Abdullah’s situation appears to be “more serious” than that of the other three AJ journalists who have been charged with “fabricating news that harms national security” and “aiding a terror group.” Abdullah has languished in prison for nine months (four months longer than his detained colleagues) and unlike them, he has not been charged thus far. Furthermore, he works for the Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr, a network that has been accused by the Egyptian government of being “a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood”, designated by Egypt as a terrorist organization last December. The three other AJ detainees work for Mubasher Misr’s sister channel, Al Jazeera English, generally perceived by Egyptians as being “more balanced” and “fair”.
In a letter smuggled out of his prison cell at the end of January, Abdullah described the dire conditions inside Torah prison, saying he was sharing a tiny cell with 16 inmates. Announcing his decision to go on hunger strike “to send a message to intimidated journalists practicing self-censorship” and “exhort them to overcome their fear,” Abdullah expressed a defiant spirit, telling the military junta that nothing would break his will or his dignity. In a video smuggled out of prison , he held the Egyptian authorities responsible should harm befall him. ” I have repeatedly asked for medical attention but to no avail,” he says in the video.
It took a nerve-wracking two days for Mosa’ab to find his “missing” brother. In a second message posted on Twitter on Wednesday, he informed his online friends and fans that Abdullah had been moved to solitary confinement in Tora’s high security “Scorpion Prison”. Abdullah was being punished “for refusing to end his hunger strike and for attracting international attention to his plight,” Mosa’ab said.
Heba Saleh, the Financial Times’ Cairo Correspondent, who visited the three AJE detainees on Wednesday, offered another explanation for Abdullah’s disappearance. She quoted prison authorities as saying that Abdullah was being punished “for a smuggled cell phone found in his possession.”
Meanwhile, the trial of the three Al Jazeera English journalists –Australian journalist Peter Greste, Cairo Bureau Chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed–took a turn for the worse on Thursday when Lawyer Farag Fathy– the Defence Attorney representing Greste–quit the case, accusing the international news network of jeopardizing his client’s case.
In a surprise move on Thursday, Fathy announced he was withdrawing from the case, adding that Al Jazeera was using the trial for “promotional purposes.” Fathy’s decision to step down came after the Qatari-hosted news network served a Notice of Dispute against Egypt for breaching a 1999 investment treaty with Qatar, Hayden Cooper , ABC’s Middle East Correspondent reported on Thursday. In an article published online by Australia’s ABC news network, Cooper said Al Jazeera was seeking US Dollars 150 million in compensation from Egypt for losses the media outlet had incurred as a result of the closure of its offices in Cairo, the jamming of its satellites broadcasting in Egypt and the mistreatment of its journalists.
Thursday’s court session made little headway as defence lawyers complained to the judge that the prosecution had asked them to pay an exaggerated fee of 1.2 million Egyptian Pounds to review “the evidence.” Adjourning the trial until May 22, the judge urged the prosecutors to allow the lawyers access to the video footage they claim contains “evidence” against the defendants. He also asked them to state in writing their “desired price” for making the footage accessible to the lawyers.
The new developments threaten to further prolong the case that has dragged on for four and a half months. Defence lawyers and analysts fear the recent turn of events may also threaten the final outcome of the case, resulting in an unfair verdict. The four detained AJ journalists, including Abdullah El Shamy, are caught up in the middle of the Egypt-Qatar political dispute, they say, adding that the case is clearly “political” and hence there is little hope that justice will prevail. Abdullah, who has completed 100 days on hunger strike, may not live long enough to hear the verdict.
On the eve of World Press Freedom Day, Index on Censorship’s Melody Patry was a guest on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, speaking about threats to journalists around the world.
