Egypt's much-abused law against "insults" to religion has claimed another victim with the jailing of a 23-year-old schoolteacher in Luxor governorate.

Demiana Emad, a Coptic Christian, was arrested more than a year ago following a complaint from the head of the parents' association at her school. She was initially fined LE 100,000 ($13,940) – an extraordinary amount considering that she had been charged under a section of the penal code which specifies a maximum fine of only LE 500 ($70).

As a result of her appeal against the illegal fine she has now been sentenced to six months' imprisonment.

According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), her case began when one of the parents of her students filed a complaint accusing her of defamation of Islam during her teaching of social studies. The school investigated the matter internally, asking many students, most of whom denied the allegations made against her. Demiana herself told a lawyer that all she did was draw a comparison between religions during ancient, middle and modern times and in accordance to the curriculum.

Last September, EIPR reported that 63 people had been charged with insulting religion during the first two years since the 2011 revolution. Many of the victims have been members of minority faiths but others have been Sunni Muslims who simply expressed an opinion about religion that others disagreed with.

Many of the accusations arise out of sectarian communal rivalries. One of the most bizarre cases involved two Coptic Christian boys, aged nine and ten, who spent 15 days in juvenile detention after being accused of urinating on pages of the Qur'an. The boys, living in a mixed Muslim/Christian village, were said to have been seen taking the pages behind a mosque where they committed the alleged offence. A neighbour 
told the Associated Press the boys were illiterate and could not have recognised the pages as coming from the Qur'an. 

Prosecutions, usually instigated by members of the public with an axe to grind, have become more common since the fall of Mubarak. In the past they mostly targeted high profile figures but now they are increasingly being used against ordinary Egyptians. Following Demiana's arrest last year, EIPR and another Egyptian organisation, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), called for a halt to trials of this kind, arguing that they were "clearly malicious" in nature and usually based based on weak evidence or, in some cases, no evidence at all.
   
Posted by Brian Whitaker
Tuesday, 17 June 2014