Egypt appeals court judge condemns al-Jazeera three trial

Judgment says no evidence trio helped Muslim Brotherhood, claims testimony was given under duress were not investigated and queries terrorism charge

 From left, Baher Mohamed, Mohamed Fahmy and Peter Greste at their trial in 2014. Photograph: Heba Elkholy/AP

Patrick Kingsley in Cairo-Tuesday 10 February 2015

A Cairo appeals judge has issued a damning appraisal of last year’s trial of three al-Jazeera English journalists, a month after he quashed their convictions and sent their case to a retrial that will begin on Thursday.

The initial trial failed to provide conclusive evidence that the defendants had helped the banned Muslim Brotherhood or promoted the group in the media, wrote Judge Anwar Gabry, the deputy head of the court of cassation, Egypt’s highest court of appeal.

Gabry said that the initial trial also failed to investigate claims that the defendants had produced testimony under duress, and as a result “the court of cassation is unable to show how right or wrong the verdict is”. His judgment also questioned whether the journalists should have been accused of terrorism, since their alleged crimes were not violent.

The news will not affect Peter Greste, the Australian ex-BBC correspondent who was deported to Australia last week after 400 days in jail following international pressure to secure his release.

But it is a boost for his Egyptian colleague, Baher Mohamed, who remains on remand, has no foreign passport to secure his release by deportation, and whose only hopes of freedom lie in a retrial. His family welcomed the appeals court judgment, which they hope might lead to the case being thrown out entirely at the retrial.

“I’m optimistic because the reasons listed by the cassation court strongly criticised the sentence,” his father Hazem told the Guardian. “As soon as I read them, I was so optimistic, and I thought they could be released in the first session.”

But he acknowledged that Mohamed’s lawyer had expressed caution.

Mohamed and Greste’s third AJE colleague, their Canadian bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, still hopes to be deported like Greste in the coming days. Fahmy gave up his Egyptian passport in December, on the understanding that he would sent back to Canada if he did so.

But a deportation failed to materialise, leading his family to criticise the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, for failing to secure his release. This criticism has drawn wider support in Canada, with the hashtag #HarperCallEgypt trending on Canadian social media in recent hours.

Mohamed Fadel Fahmy @MFFahmy11

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Lesson learned! If you are a Canadian abroad and got into trouble, you are on your own. #HarperCallEgypt #FreeAJStaff #shame

12:56 AM - 10 Feb 2015

The three journalists were first arrested in December 2013, and sentenced to several years in jail in June 2014 on charges of terrorism and spreading false news, alongside several students they had never met before the case.

Internationally, their fate was seen as an infringement of the right to free speech. Inside Egypt, government supporters saw them as a legitimate target, due to the support AJE’s Arabic sister channels gave for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned opposition group.

Additional reporting: Manu Abdo