Late last week Egypt’s Court of Cassation, its highest appellate court, ordered a retrial for the three Al Jazeera journalists — Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed — who were arrested there in December 2013 for reporting that was deemed too sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood (you know, because Real Democracies like Egypt often throw reporters in jail because the government doesn’t like what they’re reporting). Greste, Fahmy, and Mohamed were convicted, big surprise, and sentenced in June to a whopping seven (7) years in prison for, again, the crime of committing journalism that didn’t conform to the government’s interests. Mohamed got an extra 3 years for “possession of ammunition” because he had picked up a spent shell casing in the aftermath of one of those nifty government massacres of protesters that marked Egyptian politics in the last half of 2013.
Greste and Fahmy have particular reasons to be happy with the retrial order. In November, Egyptian President for Life Abdel Fattah el-Sisi decreed that deportation would henceforth be an option for any foreigners facing trial or sentencing for crimes (or “crimes”) committed in Egypt. It would be beyond naive to imagine that Sisi didn’t have exactly this scenario in mind when he issued the decree; Egypt has been under a lot of international pressure to get right with respect to its treatment of journalists, and the case of the “Al Jazeera 3” is easily the highest profile controversy that Cairo is facing in that regard. Greste is Australian, and Fahmy has dual Egyptian-Canadian citizenship, so both could theoretically be re-tried and then deported under the new law and thereby cease to be an issue. Mohamed’s case is more complicated because he’s an Egyptian citizen, but the retrial offers at least the possibility of a lesser sentence being applied.
Ideally of course all three of them would have their convictions overturned, since they never should have been arrested in the first place, but realistically they’re being tried by a crooked court under an authoritarian dictatorship, so that’s unlikely to happen. Sisi would like these three out of his hair but he also, presumably, wants to intimidate other journalists into sticking to his preferred narrative. Overturning the AJ3 sentences entirely would subvert that intimidation effort, so a change in sentencing would appear to be the more likely outcome. Still, that would be a good thing.
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