Sisi regime court upholds 15-year sentence for prominent activist

Ahmed Douma, who has been jailed since 2013, has had a 15-year prison sentence upheld.

1 min read

04 July, 2020

The Sisi regime has been condemned for a human rights abuses [Getty]

Egypt's top appeals court upheld Saturday a 15-year prison sentence for a leading figure of the country's 2011 uprising, a judicial source told AFP.

Ahmed Douma has been jailed since 2013 on charges of clashing with security forces during a protest in Cairo two years earlier.

He received a 25-year prison sentence in 2015, but a court overturned the ruling in 2017 and ordered a retrial.

In January last year, Douma was sentenced to 15 years in prison and fined six million Egyptian pounds ($372,000).

Saturday's verdict by the court of cassation upheld that sentence, which "is now final and cannot be appealed", the judicial source said.

Douma was a leading activist in the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak.

He was arrested in a crackdown following the 2013 military ouster of Mubarak's successor, Egypt's first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, led by now-President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Thousands of Morsi's supporters as well as secular activists, lawyers and academics have been swept up in the crackdown.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay connected