AIB appalled by sentencing of Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt

23 June 2014

The Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) today [23 June 2014] protested the sentencing of three journalists working for Al Jazeera English in Egypt.

The guilty verdicts were announced on Monday 23 June in a court in Cairo. The journalists – Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed – had been charged with aiding the Muslim Brotherhood and reporting false news. Greste and Fahmy were sentenced to seven years in prison. Baher Mohamed was sentenced to a total of ten years in prison.

The prosecution alleged that Greste, Al Jazeera’s East Africa correspondent, and his two colleagues from the Network’s Egypt bureau, aided the Brotherhood and produced false news reports about events in Egypt. All three journalists vehemently denied the charges. The prosecution produced a range of items as evidence that were completely unrelated to the charges, including a BBC podcast, a news report produced when none of the three accused was in Egypt and a pop video by Gotye, an Australian singer.

“AIB and its members have been shocked by both the verdicts and the sentencing in this case. The case against the journalists was repeatedly demonstrated to be flawed. This Association joins the international call for the case to be reviewed immediately and the journalists released,” said Simon Spanswick, AIB Chief Executive. “Not a single piece of evidence was found to support the charges against them in a court case that at times bordered on the farcical. AIB calls on the Egyptian authorities to release the three Al Jazeera journalists and start an immediate, thorough and transparent review of the case to restore some level of international trust in Egypt’s justice system.”

Al Anstey, Al Jazeera English managing director, said the verdicts defied “logic, sense, and any semblance of justice”.

“Today three colleagues and friends were sentenced, and will continue to be kept behind bars for doing a brilliant job of being great journalists. ‘Guilty’ of covering stories with great skill and integrity. ‘Guilty’ of defending people’s right to know what is going on in their world,” Anstey said in a statement.

Context about the journalists [source: BBC Monitoring]

Peter Greste

Australian journalist Peter Greste, 48, worked for a number of news organizations including Reuters and the BBC before joining Al Jazeera’s team.

An experienced correspondent, Greste started out reporting on Bosnia and South Africa and then moved on to cover Afghanistan, Mexico, and the Middle East. He was the BBC’s Kabul correspondent in 1995, where he watched the Taleban emerge, and he returned after the Taleban lost control of the capital in 2001.He has lived in Nairobi, Kenya since 2009 where he has covered Horn of Africa countries with a particular focus on Somalia. His documentary Somalia: Land of Anarchy won a Peabody award in 2011.

His story on the relationship between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise inspired a best-selling children’s book, Owen & Mzee [pictured right].

Greste has written open letters from Tora Prison expressing his frustration at being locked up on charges of falsifying news and damaging Egypt’s reputation. “After more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent, I know what is safe ground. And we didn’t stray anywhere near that edge,” he wrote a month into his incarceration.

He says that the “new normal” in Egypt has shifted so far from the middle ground that routine journalists’ work suddenly appears threatening. “How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt’s ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?” he asked.

Mohamed Fahmy

Al-Jazeera English’s bureau chief in Cairo, Mohamed Fahmy, 40, was born in Egypt but moved to Canada with his family in the early 1990s.

He is known for his keen professional interest in the Middle East and North Africa and has extensively reported on events there for other major news outlets such as CNN and the New York Times. Mr Fahmy is also the author of “Egyptian Freedom Story”, an account of the 2011 revolution that led to the fall of the regime of the then President Hosni Mubarak. In May 2014, the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom honoured the journalist with its annual award.

In a letter smuggled out of his prison cell, Mohamed Fahmy said that “A key part of our defence has been to convince the judge of our professional integrity; to prove to him that we are journalists striving for the truth; and not agents of terror. This award will go a long way toward making our case.”

Some prominent figures in Egypt have voiced their support for the journalist. Among them is former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, who wrote to the court saying that Mohamed Fahmy was “known as competent, has integrity and is objective”.

Baher Mohamed

Al-Jazeera producer Baher Mohamed, 30, has worked for various international media in Egypt since he graduated from Cairo University in 2005.

He was with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper from 2008 to 2013, and did freelance reporting for CNN and Iran’s English-language Press TV. Baher Mohamed joined Al Jazeera English in May 2013 and covered the protests in Cairo that started on 30 June and led to the ousting of the country’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

According to transcripts from Baher Mohamed’s interrogations by the prosecution, published in Egypt’s al-Ahram daily, the journalist said that his father was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and made him go to religious classes organised by the Islamists.

Baher Mohamed is quoted as saying that he refused to attend them as they were “boring”.