Prominent human rights activist Sanaa Seif has been jailed for 18 months by a Cairo court for purportedly making unfounded claims about the handling of Covid-19 outbreaks in Egyptian prisons, according to the BBC.
Amnesty International said she had been convicted ‘on bogus charges stemming purely from her peaceful criticism’.
Twenty-seven-year-old Seif is the daughter of the late human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif al-Islam and the Cairo University professor and veteran activist Laila Soueif. Her brother is Alaa Abdel Fattah, an influential blogger and activist who has been imprisoned since September 2019.
According to Amnesty International, Seif was detained outside the public prosecutor’s office in Cairo on 23 June last year, while trying to report a physical assault the day before.
She had claimed she was waiting outside the Tora prison complex for a letter from her brother along with her mother and her sister, Mona, when a group of women beat them with sticks and stole some of their belongings. One police officer reportedly pushed her mother towards the assailants, Amnesty International said.
But prosecutors accuse Seif of disseminating ‘false news on the deterioration of the country’s health situation, and the spread of the coronavirus in prisons’, as well as ‘misusing social media’ and insulting a police officer.
According to the BBC, Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has overseen what human rights groups say is an unprecedented crackdown on dissent since leading the military’s overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in 2013, following protests against his rule.
Al Jazeera reports that international rights groups accuse Egyptian authorities of waging a broad crackdown on dissent and jailing thousands – mainly Islamists but also others, including well-known secular activists.