CAIRO: Lawyers described proceedings in the case of three human rights activists as not meeting the fair trial standards on Saturday in a hearing that saw the judge reverse his decision about questioning witnesses.
Gamal Eid and Ahmed Seif, directors of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) and the Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC) respectively, were charged with libel, blackmail and misuse of communications.
Blogger Amr Gharbeia has been charged with libel and misuse of communications.
Amnesty International has called for the charges to be dropped.
"A guilty verdict would be a further nail in the coffin of freedom of expression in Egypt, where questionable criminal defamation charges are frequently used to harass those critical of the authorities and public officials,” Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director, is quoted as saying in a statement issued on Friday.
Eid told Daily News Egypt that during trial sessions, which began at the end of May, the judge Mohamed El-Demeiry, who is hearing the case, has admitted being “under pressure.”
“Throughout the previous sessions the judge has stated publicly that he is subjected to pressure. We have made clear to him that the only pressure he should be under is that of his conscience and we let it pass — but strange things happened during the trial today,” Eid said.
The court heard three witnesses on Saturday. Internet Crimes department officer Mostafa Hamed was questioned about his investigation into the initial complaint of libel lodged against Seif, Eid and Gharbeia by Judge Abdel-Fatah Murad in February 2007.
Hamed explained that he examined ANRHI’s website as well as 18 other sites for libelous content. On Feb. 11, 2007 ANHRI published a statement in which it accused Murad of plagiarizing 50 pages of one of its reports in his book, “Scientific and Legal Principles of Blogs.”
The statement was published on other blogs. Gharbeia wrote a book review on his website, “Annals of a Tree Lover” criticizing the book. Hamed said that a comment left on Gharbeia’s blog which alleged that Murad takes bribes is libelous.
Hamed explained to the judge that website owners are able to identify the authors of comments via their IP address, and that he summoned Gharbeia “more than once” in order to identify who wrote the comment in question “but he didn’t come.”
Gharbeia was interrogated by the public prosecution office on charges of defamation in 2007 but released without charge. Eid says that the case filed by Murad in 2007 has been circulating among public prosecution offices who declined to press charges and that it was only eventually accepted by the Khalifa public prosecution office after intervention by the attorney general.
During Hamed’s explanation of technical issues the judge said he knows nothing about computers “and only uses them for writing.” Lawyer Abdel-Gawad Ahmed, director of the Arab Council Supporting Fair Trials and Human Rights, seized on this point after the trial.
“The judge also said during the session that he knows nothing about the internet. How then can he question witnesses when his knowledge of the internet is insufficient?” Ahmed asked.
The third witness, Abdo Abdel-Aziz Hamada, ANHRI’s website designer said that it was clear that Murad had plagiarized ANHRI’s report because spelling mistakes in the report were reproduced in the book.
The judge asked Hamada how exactly Murad was able to copy content from the report in his book, to which Hamada responded that he didn’t know but that the report had been published online.
Hamada was also asked what harm had been caused by Murad using content without crediting ANHRI and what the correct protocol is for quoting material taken from the Internet.
A lawyer representing Murad asked Hamada whether the ANHRI report Murad allegedly plagiarized was originally printed in PDF or Word format. Asked by the judge about the significance of this the lawyer said that documents in PDF format “are impossible to copy.”
After Hamada finished his testimony defense lawyers requested that other defense witnesses appear. The judge however said that he had not read their testimonies made to the public prosecution office and would have to suspend the session in order to do so, prompting objections from defense lawyers. The judge then announced that the case had been adjourned until Sept. 26, 2010 and left the courtroom.
Approximately five minutes later it was then announced that the judge was summoning the witnesses in order to question them in closed chambers without the presence of lawyers or the defendants, which defense lawyers rejected.
Defense lawyers then announced that they would be exercising their right to demand that a different judge hear the case, and the case was then adjourned until Sept. 4, 2010 when a decision on the request will be issued.
Defense lawyers subsequently withdrew the demand. Eid told Daily News Egypt that El-Demeiry is “trying to make things difficult for us so that we’ll ask him to be removed because of the pressure on him.”
“However we think that having him as a judge is better than someone else who will receive orders about what to do by telephone,” Eid continued, adding that lawyers will pay a fine of about LE 2,000 for lodging and then subsequently withdrawing the demand.
Commenting on events in Saturday’s trial, Eid said that the way witness testimonies were heard was “illegal.”
“We weren’t allowed to cross-examine them and the judge wanted to hear other witnesses alone without the presence of lawyers or defendants,” adding that the session was resumed after it was initially adjourned “without a member of the public prosecution office being present” in violation of court procedural rules.
“There is no law in this case. This is an attempt to invent a case of moral misconduct and we won’t permit this,” Eid said.
“We criticize the state, we criticize torture. They should have the courage to say that they’re punishing us for our criticism. But to frame us in a case concerning our honor without even letting us defend ourselves? This isn’t justice.”
