Case snagged

A key witness in Saadeddin Ibrahim's re-trial has testified that she had no knowledge of the human rights activist's alleged misuse of foreign funding, reports Khaled Dawoud
Amina Shafiq, a prominent Al-Ahram journalist and former board member of the Press Syndicate, told the Supreme State Security Court trying American University in Cairo (AUC) sociology professor Saadeddin Ibrahim this week that she had no doubts concerning his financial integrity.
Ibrahim, a prominent human rights activist and director of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Developmental Studies, is standing trial with 27 defendants, mostly Ibn Khaldoun Centre employees, for illegally receiving funds from the European Union to finance a project aimed at encouraging Egyptians to participate in parliamentary elections. Prosecutors said Ibrahim violated Military Decree No 4 issued in 1992, banning individuals or groups from receiving foreign funding without government permission.
Shafiq was the director of a non-governmental organisation affiliated to the Ibn Khaldoun Centre. According to prosecutors, Ibrahim received $250,000 from the European Union to finance the election project, and part of that money went to the NGO headed by Shafiq. For her part, Shafiq told the court that she had no ties to the financial aspects of the project, and that her role as director of the NGO was to organise workshops aimed at encouraging Egyptian women to participate in elections.
Embezzlement is amongst the other charges being faced by Ibrahim, with prosecutors claiming the sociologist presented the EU with forged balance sheets. In her testimony, Shafiq vehemently denied any knowledge of financial irregularities on Ibrahim's part.
She also refuted the prosecutors' charge that Ibrahim used foreign funds to issue reports that were meant to distort Egypt's image abroad. These, allege the prosecutors, included reports that claimed that all parliamentary elections in Egypt were rigged in favour of the ruling party, and that the country's Coptic Christian population suffered discrimination. Shafiq told the court that the articles and research papers published by Ibrahim did not include, in her point of view, material that aimed to distort Egypt's image.
Shafiq was summoned to testify as a prosecution witness on May 2-- her statements expected to be used to help indict Ibrahim on the illegal funding charges. But Ibrahim's defense team, headed by Ibrahim Saleh, felt Shafiq's testimony was clearly in their favour. They also plan to use her statements to try to prove to the court the weakness of the government's case against their client. Saleh told Al-Ahram Weekly that if the charges made against his client were correct, Shafiq herself -- as director of a project attached to Ibn Khaldoun and thus fully aware of its European Union funding -- should have also been among the defendants.
Ibrahim's lawyers and supporters have repeatedly questioned -- since his arrest in late June 2000 -- why the government has singled out Ibrahim's NGO for illegally receiving European funds without government permission. Nearly all of Egypt's NGOs depend on foreign funding, whether from the European Union, or from major US and European NGOs and institutions known for promoting human rights issues in Third World countries.
Ibrahim's lawyers have continued to insist that his trial was political, triggered mainly because Ibrahim insisted on monitoring the 2000 parliamentary elections. The government vehemently rejects outside monitoring of elections, considering it -- especially if foreign countries are involved -- as an infringement on its sovereignty. It also claims that since the laws were changed prior to the 2000 vote, in order to allow judges to supervise elections instead of civil servants, there was no need for any monitoring by outside parties or local NGOs.
After a six-month trial, Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in May 2001. The rest of the defendants received jail terms ranging from a suspended one-year sentence to five years in prison. Eight months into Ibrahim's sentence, the country's highest Court of Cassation overturned the May 2001 ruling and ordered a retrial. The court cited several procedural irregularities in the earlier ruling, including the court's failure to consider the claim made by one of the defendants, Khaled Fayad, that he was forced to confess under duress.
The new judicial panel, headed by Judge Adel Abdel-Salam, adjourned the case until 12 May to listen to witnesses requested by the defense team. These include prominent public figures and writers who are expected to testify, like they did in the first trial, that Ibrahim is a renowned rights activist whose main activities involved promoting human rights issues and democracy.
Ibrahim's case is particularly sensitive because of his dual Egyptian-American citizenship. Ibrahim's critics, opposed in particular to his earlier support of normalisation of ties with Israel, have accused the United States of putting pressure on the Egyptian government to release him. But Ibrahim -- who has expressed confidence in Egypt's judiciary -- has consistently denied that he was counting on US pressure to help his case. He said he was being tried as an Egyptian, and that he was mainly seeking the support of both local and international human rights groups.
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