Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

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Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Winged Isis »

Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death in 2013 Sit-in Case

28 July 2018 — 8:36pm

Egypt’s state-run media says a court has sentenced 75 people to death, including top figures of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group, for their involvement in a 2013 sit-in.

Saturday’s decision in Cairo Criminal Court will now be referred to the Grand Mufti — the country’s top theological authority — for his non-binding opinion on the sentences. He usually approves the court’s decision.

The case involves Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, who was arrested for taking photos at the Rabaa massacre.
Sentencing for more than 660 others was set for September 8, according to state-run Al-Ahram news website.

The case involves 739 defendants, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie and photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid. Charges range from murder to damaging public property.

The 2013 sit-in supported former Islamist President Mohammed Morsi who was militarily ousted following mass protests against his divisive one-year rule. Morsi hailed from the Brotherhood. The sit-in was violently dispersed.


https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-eas ... 4zu7n.html


Carpe diem! :le:
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Horus »

That's the way to deal with em :up
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Dusak »

Inmates probably complained their cells were getting a tad overcrowded. Nothing like a spring clean in summer. :urm:
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by newcastle »

If the sentences are carried out - unlikely in my view - then you have to conclude that participating in a kerfuffle during which security forces died is viewed as much more heinous than paying someone to have your mistress murdered.

Given a fair wind, and economic expediency, the latter can be pardoned and the culprit freed to resume his multi-million dollar business.

Even if spared the hangman's rope, the former will rot in jail forever.
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Hafiz »

Collective Death Sentences.

Egypt is the only or the near only country in the world to hold all members of a group responsible for the most excessive behavior of individual members of that group if there is no clear and agreed plan in advance by all to commit that most excessive behavior or no reasonable expectation by all that it was probable. No civilized country does what Egypt does and few/none of the rest do.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, have been convicted of murder when they were part of large demonstrator groups where a small number of that group may or may not have committed murder. In none of these cases has there been witness testimony or forensic evidence that the murders were committed by members of the demonstrator group rather, say, than the police/army/security services or an unrelated group that may or may not have been within the demonstrator group.

In some or all of the large group prosecutions lawyers have been unable or prevented to talking to their clients and some of the group prosecutions have been of up to 700 accused in a single prosecution conducted in brief time where there was not even the appearance of considering individual guilt or even that the accused was at that location at the time. Some were convicted even though there was conclusive evidence they were overseas at the time.

There is no doubt that these processes and the legal principle of indiscriminate group guilt where it is clear that the murder has actually been done by a small number of individuals (police, demonstrators or third parties) is contrary to all accepted legal theory, international law and the legal conventions Egypt has signed.

That the UN and the International Court, the EU, USA and UK have not taken issue with this barbaric, illogical and uncivilized legal behavior is difficult to understand.

The possible legal basis for this practice is:

“In March 2011, a month after the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took over, the “Bal taga” (i.e., Thuggery) law was issued. The law permits punishing all participants in a protest or gathering during which a murder took place, even if participants were not involved. If someone is murdered, everyone can be sentenced to death. In November 2014, the law was formally challenged as unconstitutional for being ambiguous and for violating the principles of just punishment. However, the Constitutional Court has yet to annul or suspend the law, which allows criminal courts to continue to sentence individuals collectively.”

A small illustration of the sloppy incompetent prosecution and judicial work:

“Among the 183 defendants in Minya charged with belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and sentenced to death for raiding the local police department and killing a police officer were a blind man and a Christian. A child was also among the defendants, despite the fact that Egyptian law clearly prohibits sentencing a child to death.”
https://timep.org/commentary/analysis/t ... -in-egypt/
http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/03/16 ... -pub-68285

One of the many problems with this law is how do you prove that you were an unrelated bystander to a demonstration/a demonstration where there was a murder. For example a shop keeper in the relevant street, a medicens sans frontier worker there to help with injuries, a Red Crescent worker, a person walking on the street caught up in the flow of the mass of demonstrators, a person living in the street needing to go out because of a family emergency, in the case of the Rabaa massacre and one other around a mosque – a person praying in the mosque who can’t get out because of the demonstration. In all cases there is a border/demarcation issue about who is part of what.

The law and police investigations are blind to atrocities. In demonstrations where up to 800 civilians have been murdered no police/army/security services have been charged even though there are eye witnesses that they fired on unarmed civilians and even though it is probable that very few of the large crowd of demonstrators were armed. In this particular situation there were no autopsies/the government prohibited autopsy for fear it would incriminate state involvement in the civilian killings.

A long and gushy Los Angeles Times article from June 2018 identifying a January 2017 case challenging the existence/legality of the illegal assembly/guilt by assemvly law and on human rights generally. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pri ... sis-egypt/#! I can’t find an outcome of the 2017 case.

It states that a noted Egyptian journalist, Bahgat, has proven/shown that the prison breakout in 2011 or so of Jihadi’s and Brotherhood types which the army blamed on the Brotherhood and imprisoned its leaders for this was, rather, done by the Army. He was imprisoned and the Secretary General of the UN called for his release. It also states that Sisi has no policies, political beliefs, abstract ideas or social objectives other than power and the Army.

A local report which partially contradicts the Los Angeles Times article and reports a December 2016 Constitutional Court decision that limits/circumvents the protest/demonstration/guilt by assembly law. https://egyptjustice.com/analysis/2016/ ... titutional. Reuters thinks that the protest law was upheld. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egyp ... SKBN13S0GI

In some ways the law is like an incompetent cop who rounds up everyone and treats them bad versus a clever cop who uses an intellectual scalpel to identify a few probables and spends his limited time interrogating 5 in detail rather than his mate who barely has time to photograph 500. Drag net fishing rather than trout fly fishing. Its also a lot like Nasser's round up of the Brotherhood. Details unclear but probably 10,000-50,000, torture, barbaric jails in the western desert and no acknowledgement that, like all organizations, it contained a diversity of positions from OK to horrible and people who can be turned and those who will never change. Then and now there is only black for the Junta.
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by newcastle »

It's often difficult to determine who did what to whom in clashes between civilians and the forces of the law.

On 3 July, the Egyptian parliament provisionally approved legislation that grants what it termed “senior army officers” exemption from prosecution for any acts committed during the transition period that followed the July 2013 military coup.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/human ... 2046613996

That makes the outcome of any court action a little simpler. :ct
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Dusak »

Guilt by association law is being increasingly used in not only the countries you quote, but many others. Just one example. The second showing just how easy it is to accuse/associate a person concerning presumed guilt by just using google.

Guilty by association refers to the attribution of guilt without any proof on individuals solely for the reason that those whom they associate with or are seen to associate with are guilty.

Alex has been charged with a murder committed by a friend in a spontaneous fight; Wayne has been convicted of possessing a firearm he never touched; Joseph is serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't even see. All of them have been convicted using the law of Joint Enterprise under which a person in a group or gang can be held responsible for the criminal acts of others.
Joint Enterprise is a 300-year-old law which has been increasingly used in recent years to combat the rise in gang violence. Its supporters argue that it ensures that those who encourage violent crimes are held responsible for their actions and that it deters further violence. It has been used to secure convictions in a number of high profile murder cases, including two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence and the three murderers of Ben Kinsella. Others argue that it is leading to wrongful convictions of people who were only on the periphery of a crime, but who will, nevertheless, be sentenced to mandatory life sentences.

This documentary follows the story of Alex's family after his arrest and during his trial for murder at the Old Bailey and also examines the cases of Wayne and Joseph. We speak to defence lawyers, prosecutors and also to the families of victims, including the Kinsellas, who believe that without Joint Enterprise their children's killers would have walked free.

The programme raises questions about how we deal with group violence, what makes a murderer and whether we are locking young people away on life sentences for crimes they did not commit.


Guilt Through Algorithmic Association
You’re a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you’re a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes “is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?” and “Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda.” Google’s search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like “Al Qaeda” as the next term in relation to your name. You know that colleges are looking up your name and you’re afraid of the impression that they might get based on that auto-complete. You are already getting hostile comments in your hometown, a decidedly anti-Muslim environment. You know that you have nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but Google gives the impression that you do. And people are drawing that conclusion. You write to Google but nothing comes of it. What do you do?

This is guilt through algorithmic association. And while this example is not a real case, I keep hearing about real cases. Cases where people are algorithmically associated with practices, organizations, and concepts that paint them in a problematic light even though there’s nothing on the web that associates them with that term. Cases where people are getting accused of affiliations that get produced by Google’s auto-complete. Reputation hits that stem from what people _search_ not what they _write_.

It’s one thing to be slandered by another person on a website, on a blog, in comments. It’s another to have your reputation slandered by computer algorithms. The algorithmic associations do reveal the attitudes and practices of people, but those people are invisible; all that’s visible is the product of the algorithm, without any context of how or why the search engine conveyed that information. What becomes visible is the data point of the algorithmic association. But what gets interpreted is the “fact” implied by said data point, and that gives an impression of guilt. The damage comes from creating the algorithmic association. It gets magnified by conveying it.

What are the consequences of guilt through algorithmic association?
What are the correction mechanisms?
Who is accountable?
What can or should be done?

Update: Guilt through algorithmic association is not constrained to Google. This is an issue for any and all systems that learn from people and convey collective “intelligence” back to users. All of the examples that I was given from people involved Google because Google is the dominant search engine. I’m not blaming Google. Rather, I think that this is a serious issue for all of us in the tech industry to consider. And the questions that I’m asking are genuine questions, not rhetorical one
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Hafiz »

Thanks.

Yes joint enterprise and related concepts have been around for a while and used to rely on agreed plans or a test of what a reasonable person would expect to happen out of which mutual culpability arose. In recent decades the UK courts have gone further as you illustrate but a few years ago the appeals court reversed the flow.

In the last year there has been a push in UK Parliament to maybe roll it back further to the classic definition. Thank God Australia did not go down the same track.

In the case of the Egypt courts even an extreme UK position - multiplied 400% - would not have supported many convictions for those for whom there was not conclusive evidence of actual killing, association, prior agreement, common purpose, assistance before or after or the like. The principle used to be close association, complicity, assistance, prior knowledge or the reasonable person test of each.

In Egypt its a drag net with little caution that its attached to a death sentence or 20-30 years of prison. A sort of you were there and you're responsible. If you applied it to a soccer crown you could get 70,000 death sentences. This approach of mere physical association would not be supported by many judges in even the biggest toilets in the world and there is not a single legal text or journal article in the world (other than crazies) that supports it or ever did. In any crowd there will be lunatics and sane people - who probably loathe each other if they know each other. Some have gone to kill whilst others to protest peacefully. That all should be treated the same given their different intent and knowledge is absurd.

Egypt on this matter is way out on a limb and its objective is not justice but the destruction of the Brotherhood and all other forms of dissent. The effect is also to conceal that some demonstrators were killed by the state rather than by the demonstrators - packaging it up in a brief mass trial of 'everyone is responsible for everything' helps the cover-up.
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Re: Egypt Court Sentences 75 to Death

Post by Major Thom »

So right Hafiz!!

Such freedom to live in a Country that preaches freedom of speech, no regulation on news media etc etc... I gather there is no end to oppression. When something new crops up it is slammed down
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