Egypt’s Sisi Grants Armed Forces Immunity From Prosecution

Date: 05 July 2022 - 21:51

News ID: ۱۰۴۴۶۶

CAIRO (Dispatches) – Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has issued a new decree granting immunity to all members of the country’s armed forces.

According to the new decree, the ministry of defence is the number one sovereign ministry in the country and its officers and soldiers have complete immunity.

This immunity means that no one in the country can question them and if they do, they will be subject to investigation themselves.

When a state of emergency is declared in the country, members of the military are not subject to emergency laws.

No authority in Egypt has the right to search the properties of officers or to grant a search warrant for anybody to search their property or vehicles, according to the decree.

The document was leaked to Arabi21 over the weekend by unnamed sources who have said they believe al-Sisi is trying to consolidate control over the armed forces as opposition to his role grows.

Not for the first time, ‘Leave Sisi’ was trending on social media sites in Egypt over the weekend as Egyptians called out the president for failing to fix the crushing economic crisis and for the relentless human rights abuses which take place.

Researcher Sentenced

to 3 Years

In another development, Egyptian activist and researcher Ahmed Samir Santawy has been sentenced to serve three years in prison on charges of publishing “false news”.

Santawy was initially sentenced to four years in prison on the same charge last month. Monday’s verdict by the emergency state security court concluded Santawy’s retrial, which cannot be appealed.

Santawi, a master’s student in anthropology at the Central European University in Vienna (CEU), was arbitrarily arrested for his academic work on women’s rights during a visit to Egypt in February 2021.

According to Amnesty International, he was “beaten and questioned” by the Egyptian authorities for five days and interrogated for terrorism-related accusations.

In May 2021, he was referred to trial over the charge of “publishing false news to undermine the state, its national interests and public order and spread panic among the people”.

Santawy is among scores of Egyptians who have been arrested since 2013. According to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, the total number of prisoners in Egypt in March 2021 was 120,000, with an estimated 65,000 political prisoners - at least 26,000 of whom were being held in pre-trial detention.

Human rights activist Patrick Zaki was freed in December. The 28-year-old had been studying at Italy’s Bologna University at the time of his arrest. He was taken into custody upon his return to Cairo in February 2020.

Zaki’s arrest drew international condemnation, particularly in Italy. Zaki had been an outspoken campaigner for the truth about the 2016 murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt.