Egypt upholds life sentences for 10 Muslim Brotherhood figures

July 12, 2021: Egypt’s Supreme Court of Appeals has upheld the life sentences of 10 leaders of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood, including the group’s leader, according to MENA state news agency.

The verdict was handed down on Sunday by a Cairo criminal court, which charged the group’s leader, or Supreme Leader, Mohammed Badi, with killing police officers and breaking into prison on a large scale during the 2011 uprising in Egypt. The 2019 sentence has been upheld. The coup ended the rule of longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.

The suspects were charged with aiding and abetting about 20,000 prisoners and undermining national security through the conspiracies of foreign armed groups – the Palestinian group, Hamas and Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah. Meanwhile, the Court of Cassation acquitted eight middle-ranking Muslim Brotherhood leaders who had previously been sentenced to 15 years in prison. All sentences to be considered on appeal in court are final.

Sunday’s orders upheld the latest life sentence for Muslim Brotherhood leaders. He has been on trial several times since the crackdown on the group in 2013, following a military coup that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the late Mohamed Morsi. Morsi joined the group. His one-year rule made the nationwide protests controversial and provocative. The uprising to overthrow Morsi was led by current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood in late 2013 and cracked down extensively after sending thousands of his supporters to prison.

Thousands of Egyptians have been arrested since 2013, and many have fled the country. Morsi himself was a defendant in the jailbreak, but he fell in a courtroom and died in a separate trial in the summer of 2019.

Last month, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of 12 people involved in a 2013 protest, including several senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s director of research and advocacy for the Middle East and North Africa, said at the time that the death penalty “casts a shadow over the country’s entire justice system”. Luther said Egypt had become the third most executed country in the world, adding that at least 51 men and women had been executed so far in 2021.

Similarly, Egyptian and other rights groups abroad have condemned the trials and the death penalty as a mockery of justice. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has called for Islam to be the center of public life. It established itself as the main opposition movement in Egypt, despite decades of oppression, and influenced spin-off movements and political parties around the world. But it is banned in several countries, including Egypt, for alleged links to “terrorism.”

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