(Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP File )
Lawyer and activist Ragia Omran was found not guilty of disrupting a trial during a court session on Saturday.
Omran is part of the legal team defending people accused in the “Operations Room” case. During the latest case session, Omran went outside the courtroom to answer a phone call and came back in, said lawyer Halim Henish.
After the session, Omran received a summoning order from Maadi police station, stating that she was wanted for interrogation for disrupting the session.
Judge Nagy Shehata, who is presiding over the Operations Room case, had previously requested Omran’s referral to prosecution for disrupting a court session, buts she was not interrogated.
Henish said that these summonses are illegal and represent an “ambush of detainees and their lawyers” by the judiciary.
“Nagy Shehata talks like he is an enemy of the revolution and its youth,” Henish said.
The “Operations Room” trial involves 52 defendants charged with “forming an operations room to direct the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood group to defy the government during the Rabaa [Al-Adaweya] sit-in dispersal and to spread chaos in the country”, according to a statement released by the prosecutor general’s office on 3 February.
Omran is a member of the “No to Military Trials for Civilians” campaign, established in 2011 to provide legal support to detainees and to advocate against the use of military trials of Egyptian civilians.
Omran has worked on issues related to women’s rights in Egypt for over two decades. In 1995, she helped lead the Egyptian Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Task Force, which successfully outlawed the practice in public hospitals in Egypt, a nation where 91% of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 are victims of FGM, according to UNICEF.
In November 2013, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights presented Omran with an award to honour her work and commitment to human rights in Egypt.
Omran is currently a member of the New Woman Foundation (NWF) that works to defend women’s social, political, economic, and cultural rights, and was one of the first groups to speak publicly about violence against women in Egypt beginning in the 1990s. NWF has been actively advocating for increased civic participation for women and for women to have a say in the newly formed Egyptian government.
