Yara Sallam’s nomination for the Front Line Defenders award “not only honours her and her efforts but all those in Egyptian prisons on protest charges”, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) said in a statement Thursday.
CIHRS first nominated Sallam after an Egyptian court upheld a prison sentence for her and 23 others arrested on charges of violating the Protest Law.
Security forces arrested Sallam and 23 others on 21 June 2014 as they were demonstrating against the controversial Protest Law near the Presidential Palace.
Sallam and her colleagues were charged with the “destruction of property, exhibiting a show of force to intimidate passersby and endanger their lives, and participation in an assembly of more than five persons with the objective of threatening the public peace”.
On 26 October 2014, a Cairo Misdemeanour Court gave them a three-year prison sentence and a fine of EGP 100,000 each as well as three-years of police probation after release; an appeals court later revised the sentence to two years.
According to CIHRS, “several irregularities marred the integrity of the trial” as the defendants were not allowed to refute evidence used against them. Defendants’ families could not attend the first trial which was held at the Police Academy.
The 29-year-old Sallam was a lawyer, an activist, a blogger, and an officer on transitional justice at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). She first studied law at the Sorbonne in France and Cairo University in Egypt and continued her studies in international human rights law at Notre Dame University.
The annual Front Line Defenders award was established in 2006 to honour a human rights defender who “through non-violent work, is courageously making an outstanding contribution to the promotion and protection of the human rights of others, often at great personal risk to themselves,” according to the official website.
