The trials of three Egyptian activists and a rights lawyer, who have been held in prison for over two years on a number of charges, have been postponed.
According to lawyer Khalid Ali, Activists Alaa Abdel-Fattah, Mohamed Ibrahim and Yahia Hussein Abdel-Hadi and lawyer Mohammed el-Baker appeared before judges of the Emergency State Security Court in Cairo.
They will be tried in two separate proceedings in the same courtroom.
The trial of Abdel-Fattah, Ibrahim and el-Baker was postponed until Nov. 1, while Abdel-Hadi’s was postponed to Oct. 25, according to Ali. The judges postponed proceedings to allow defense lawyers time to review trial-related documents, he said.
The four face charges ranging from disseminating false news and misuse of social media platforms to joining a terrorist group, a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt designated as a terrorist group in 2013.
Egypt’s government has in recent years waged a wide-scale crackdown on dissent, jailing thousands of people, mainly Islamists but also secular activists involved in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Abdel-Fattah and Ibrahim, who is known as Mohamed Oxygen, were arrested late in 2019 while on probation amid a sweeping security clampdown following small but rare anti-government protests.
El-Baker was arrested while attending a questioning session of Abdel-Fattah by prosecutors in September 2019.
Abdel-Hadi is a co-founder of the Civil Democratic Movement, a coalition of liberal and left-leaning parties opposing the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.
He was arrested in January 2019 ahead of the vote on constitutional amendments that enabled el-Sissi to run for two more four-year terms.
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