No half-term releases THE HOUSE of Representatives' Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Committee on Sunday approved the cabinet's draft law cancelling the conditional half-term release of prisoners involved in drugs, mass gatherings, money laundering and terrorism. During the committee's meeting, representative of the Interior Ministry Abdel-Fattah Serag said the draft law deprived prisoners of the half-term release after committing dangerous crimes harming the state and its people. Chairman of the Human Rights Committee Alaa Abed said he approved the draft law to preserve the Egyptian identity and the Egyptian people. The current law states that it is permissible to grant convicts a conditional release if they serve half their sentence and that their behaviour in prison ensures they can correct themselves unless the release is a threat to public security.
Ten years in absentia MINYA Criminal Court on Saturday sentenced three defendants to 10 years in absentia for stripping an elderly Coptic woman of her clothes and torching her house in the midst of sectarian strife in the village of Al-Karam in May 2016. The ruling was issued after the defendants did not respond to the court's attendance notification and did not appear during the trial. In May 2016, the homes of Christian Copts in Al-Karam were attacked following rumours of an affair between a married Muslim woman and the son of the Coptic woman named Souad Thabet. The husband of the Muslim woman, his brother and father were charged with the assault against Thabet who filed a lawsuit against them. In the wake of the incident, the husband sued his wife and Thabet's son on charges of adultery. In July 2017, a misdemeanour court in Minya sentenced the two to two years in prison and fined them LE1 million as temporary compensation. Thabet's lawyer noted that the ruling allows the three defendants to appeal the verdict and receive a retrial if they are arrested, according to the law.
Misusing cleaning money THE MINISTRY of Electricity announced this week that it would stop collecting cleaning fees on electricity bills starting July. Minister of Electricity Mohamed Shaker said power companies would continue to collect cleaning fees up until June, after which they will be removed from the bill in July. Speaking in parliament on Monday, Shaker said that for the past four years he had made several requests for the cabinet to stop collecting cleaning fees attached to electricity bills, especially since they were not within the scope of the ministry's work and caused the relevant authorities problems when collecting the money. Head of parliament's Energy Committee Talaat Al-Sewidi had previously accused municipalities across Egypt of taking the money and using it to fund projects not related to cleaning purposes.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 16 January, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
