Lawyers continued Thursday their defense for the prominent human rights activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Since Saturday, the councilors have tried to undermine the prosecution’s case against the sociologist and reclaiming his defamed reputation, according to Cairo Times.
Five defense lawyers delivered on April 14 and 15 oral arguments that were by turns moving elocutions on Ibrahim’s place in history and methodical legal rebuttals of the prosecution’s “vague claims.”
Ibrahim and his 27 co-defendants are being tried on four charges in a High State Security Court: bribing public employees; receiving unauthorized foreign donations in violation of military decree No. 4/1992; spreading information abroad harmful to Egypt’s interests; and swindling international organizations of their funds.
The defense team employed a two-pronged strategy of tight logic and stirring rhetoric to make its case, said the paper.
“Rhetorically, they countered the prosecution’s epithets with Ibrahim’s positive attributes, from his status as the Arab world’s premier social scientist to his work as a consultant for international organizations such as the UN and World Bank,” said the report.
Logically, they sought to undermine the entire legal edifice upon which the prosecution’s case is built, particularly the archaic Article 48 of the penal code, created in 1910 after the assassination of Prime Minister Boutros Ghali. The article makes it easier to prove charges of conspiracy by doing away with stringent requirements for material evidence of criminal intent. The situation-specific military decree issued on 20 October 1992 after the Cairo earthquake was also a crucial element in defense arguments. That decree forbids any NGO from taking any sort of funding without written permission from the Ministry of Social Affairs.
"I want to emphasize to the court the fragility, feebleness, and shallowness of the charges leveled against my client, and the lack of material evidence," concluded lead lawyer Ibrahim Saleh in his 14 April argument. Defense lawyers resumed their arguments on 17, 18, and 19 April.
The trial of Egyptian-US human rights and his co-defendants had resumed after it was adjourned for two months on February 19 following the prosecution's demand for the maximum sentence of 15 years of hard labor for the 28 defendants.
Ibrahim, who heads the Ibn Khaldun Center for Human Rights, was arrested on June 30, 2000 in a case he linked to legislative elections held later in the year, is accused mainly of "spreading false reports overseas of electoral fraud and religious persecution to undermine state interests." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
