Prison sentences handed out by an emergency court to writer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, lawyer Mohamed al-Baqer and blogger Mohamed “Oxygen” Ibrahim have been ratified, confirming that the two years for which the defendants were held without trial will not be deducted from their sentences, lawyers told Mada Masr.

Over charges of publishing false news, Abd El Fattah was handed five years in prison by an emergency state security misdemeanors court in December 2021, while both Baqer and Ibrahim were sentenced to four years each by the same court.

Abdel Fattah, Baqer and Oxygen were arrested in September 2019 and were detained without being referred to trial for two years until October 2021, the maximum legal limit that people can be held in remand detention.

But the time they have already spent in jail will not be counted toward their sentences, as they were tried in a nominally different case than the one for which they were first detained, though the false news charges were essentially the same, lawyer Ahmed Ragheb had told Mada Masr.

Baqer’s wife, Naema Hisham, said she was not informed regarding the status of the sentence that her husband received until she made her own enquiries and was told that Baqer’s sentence began when the ruling against him was ratified on January 3, 2022 and would last until January 3, 2026.

All three defendants were handed prison sentences following a brief three-session trial, in which their defense lawyers were not granted access to case files and were not given the opportunity to present their defense.

Emergency state security courts were made competent under the emergency law, which was first enacted in 2017 before it was finally allowed to expire at the end of last year. The trials are not subject to the standard appeals process, as they are referred to the military ruler — the president of the republic or whoever he delegates — for ratification. Once ratified, a ruling becomes final and may not be appealed. The only recourse is to submit a grievance to the military ruler.

Abd El Fattah, Ibrahim and Baqer were informed on October 13 last year that they had been referred to an emergency court, just under two weeks before President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that the state of emergency would not be renewed.

Cases already referred to emergency trial are still eligible to be conducted by emergency state security courts, even after the state of emergency has elapsed.

The move was “a fierce repression of peaceful critics… [that] remains the order of the day in Egypt,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said at the time. The rights organization had highlighted 48 individuals who had been in remand detention and were referred to emergency courts shortly before the end of the state of emergency. “The egregious miscarriage of justice handed down by this exceptional court to punish peaceful expression reveals how Egypt’s justice system has itself become a tool of repression,” Stork added.

Over the past few months, at least two emergency court rulings have been annulled by the military ruler. The first, in an apparently unprecedented move, was a six-month sentence issued in absentia against politically outspoken engineer Mamdouh Hamza in October.

In mid-February 2022, the military ruler issued a similar decision annulling a four-year prison sentence against postgraduate researcher Ahmed Samir Santawy, paving the way for a retrial that is due to begin in March.