CAIRO – Mohamed Fawzy was just 21 when he was jailed by an Egyptian military court for 25 years, accused of stealing refrigerators. “Since his arrest last year, I have been exhausted and hysterical,” said his mother Sabreya Fahmy, choking back tears. “I could kneel at the president's feet to bring me back my innocent son.” At least 12,000 civilians have gone before army courts in the security vacuum that followed the fall of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, according to the campaign group No to Military Trials, and at least 5,000 are still in jail. Many of those jailed were arrested in the protests that erupted during the 18 months an interim military government was in charge in Egypt, and some have even been tried since civilian President Mohamed Morsi took office in June. Morsi has pardoned 630 civilians on the recommendation of a committee he formed to study the cases of 2,165 prisoners. The committee said the cases of the remaining prisoners needed to be investigated further. Activists want the remainder to be released or at least referred to civilian courts for retrials. Until Morsi acts, they say, his claim to champion the cause of last year's Arab Spring uprising will be open to question. “It is shameful that President Morsi, who rose to power because of these civilians' struggle and the time they are spending in jail, is sitting in his palace eating with his family, while we have no clue what has become of the people inside those prisons,” said prominent activist Ahmed Domma. They also say the situation is a direct – and dangerous – challenge to Morsi, Egypt's first elected head of state in 5,000 years. Morsi earlier this month dismissed the country's top generals in a bold show of power after 60 years of military leadership. “The military is still continuing to sentence people and use military tribunals as if it is saying to the president you are not the only one in power,” said Salma Abdel-Gelil, a member of No to Military Trials. Activists have long complained that military trials were used by Mubarak to secure convictions that might not have been possible in more open and accountable civilian courts. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the socially conservative movement from which he hails, came late to the uprising against Mubarak that was begun by liberal and left-wing activists. While voicing the same commitment to democracy as those of revolutionaries, and pressing the army to stick to its timetable for elections, the Brotherhood generally avoided direct confrontation with the generals when they were temporarily in charge. “The track record of the Brothers during this period is characterized by promises broken and silence in the face of abuses, such as military trials for civilians and the application of the emergency law for most of the SCAF's tenure,” Michael Wahid Hanna of The Century Foundation wrote in Foreign Policy. – Reuters
