Egypt targets LGBT community with new crackdown

An Egyptian court has sentenced 11 men accused of being gay to jail terms of between three and 12 years, legal sources said.

The defendants, who were arrested in a flat in the leafy Cairo suburb of Agouza in September last year, were convicted of "debauchery and incitement to debauchery".

The men were allegedly part of a network that offered sexual services for money, acquiring clients through social media, state-owned newspaper al-Ahram reported at the time.

In 2014, a group of rights activists reached out to gay dating websites urging them to issue safety warnings to their Egyptian users.

Grindr - a gay dating application - warned their Egyptian users that "police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you".

In September, Grindr announced that locations would be hidden by default for users in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Russia, which have a history of prosecuting those from the LGBT community.

Though there are no explicit rules against same-sex relations in Egypt, they remain a strong social taboo. People are normally charged under laws against debauchery or public indecency.

In December last year, Egyptian TV presenter Mona Iraqi accompanied a police raid on a central Cairo bathhouse. Her television crew filmed and took pictures of at least 25 half-naked men as they were arrested for "perversion" and dragged into police trucks.

Iraqi claimed the reason behind the raid was to expose a "group sex den" that allegedly contributed to the spread of HIV in Egypt.

Though there are no explicit rules against same-sex relations in Egypt, they remain a strong social taboo, and people are normally charged under laws against debauchery or public indecency.

The raid came as part of a growing crackdown on Egypt's LGBT community at the time.

When the defendants were later acquitted by a Cairo court in January 2015, they still had to face the associated social stigma of being accused of homosexuality.

One defendant even attempted suicide after the scandal.

"This case is a rare victory for human rights and judicial independence in Egypt, but prosecutors never should have brought these charges in the first place," Boris Dittrich, the LGBT advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said at the time.

Iraqi was later sentenced to six months in prison on charges of defamation and spreading lies that destroyed the defendants' reputation.