On Feb 9th, The Court of Cassation accepted appeal No. 16126 of 93, submitted by Badr Mohamed Abdullah, and issued a final judgment sentencing him to only one year, correcting the first-degree five-year prison sentence issued against him by the Criminal Court. Thus, Abdullah’s release became enforceable, having already spent nearly five years in detention. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) calls on the Ministry of Interior to implement the judicial ruling without delay and release Abdullah, who has already served five times the final sentence handed down against him.

The case, known in local media as the Al-Fath Mosque events, dates back to 2013, when demonstrations erupted in Ramses Square in Cairo and ended up with clashes that resulted in several deaths and injuries. The next day, people trapped in the nearby Al-Fath Mosque and those in its vicinity were randomly arrested, including Abdullah, who was on his way to buy school supplies from the Faggala area in preparation for the start of his first year at the Faculty of Engineering. Abdullah was 17 years old at the time.

Abdullah spent three months in pretrial detention in connection with Case No. 8615 of 2013 (Azbakeya Felonies), before being released in the same year. In May 2020, he was arrested again after being sentenced in absentia to five years in prison in the same case. His retrial lasted three years, until the Criminal Court upheld the five-year prison sentence in January 2023.

According to Hoda Nasrallah, Abdullah’s lawyer and director of EIPR’s Legal Unit, the Court of Cassation applied the law regarding the duration of the sentence, and based its judgement on the legal principle that grants the trial judge the right to use clemency with the defendant and reduce the penalty to imprisonment, so that the penalty ranges from 24 hours to three years in prison. The Court of Cassation used its powers in estimating the penalty and confined it to only one year in prison. This came in line with the report submitted by the Criminal Cassation Prosecution, which stated that the Criminal Court erred in the application of the law, as it was proven that Abdullah was a minor at the time of the incident. This obliged the court to apply Article 111 of the Child Law, which provides for the infliction of a prison sentence in crimes prescribed for the death penalty, life imprisonment or rigorous imprisonment, meaning that the original penalty for the crimes contained in the referral order for the child is imprisonment. As the retrial judge commuted the penalty from imprisonment to detention, he had to apply Article 18 of the Penal Code and reduce the penalty to 24 hours to three years in prison, the legal maximum period of detention.