By Jihad Abaza
The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights issued a statement Monday calling for the immediate release of the detainees who are still being withheld despite the court ruling.
An appeals court acquitted 15 detainees from Alexandria and 63 detainees from Cairo in what are known as the Miami and Azbakeya cases on Sunday and Monday this week.
Two of the detainees, Mohamed Khaled Hassan and Ahmed AbdelHady, were sentenced to three months in prison; although they have completed their term they have not yet been released.
Lawyer for ECESR Suzanne Nada said: “The issue is that criminal justice must be quicker than this. The slowness of the process is another form of injustice and pressure on the detainees.”
According to ECESR, the detainees in the Miami and Azkabeya cases were arbitrarily arrested on the eve of the 25 January Revolution in Alexandria and are accused of violating the Protest Law.
“The Egyptian Center, while it values the appeal in both cases, expresses deep sorrow that the detainees have not been released until now… in addition to their five month detention without any compensation for their time in prison, and especially for the cases of torture on the Azbakeya detainees during their detention period,” the statement read.
The ECESR also demanded that “the Egyptian judiciary renege on all the court rulings that have come out against the revolutionaries and led to the imprisonment of a number of them in different cases, the most recent of which is the detention of 24 protestors for 15 years”.
The statement ended with the condemnation of the police forces’ treatment of protestors, referring to the security forces’ dispersal of the Itihadiya Palace protest on 21 June, and the arrest of 23 protestors in four days.
