This is the regular procedure.

Manal, Alaa and Gamal were ordered to be freed at 14:30, but they did not leave immediately. They had to be taken to a Doqqi police station, then to Giza security department, then to Doqqi police station again before they are freed (to check their criminal record supposedly), a process which lasted until after ten in the night.

It is slow justice, and this is the regular procedure.

They were actually lucky the thing ended in a single day, and there was not hand-cuffs involved for so long (after being freed).

proceedings are definitely colored by the judges influence, note also that the two witnesses who testified against us are the lawyers who started the hesba case against Abdol Karim, the whole thing is very fishy.

the normal process of justice in Egypt is rife with human rights violations, the fact that it is legal, common and minor relative to the more serious abuses does not mean “no human rights violated”

also proceedings are withing criminal law not civil law. and since the constitutional amendment it is meaningless to speak of emergency law, what used to be a special case is now the constitution.

I would like to make sure that things are clear. this is a libel case against the three of them after exposing plagiarism done by the Judge, and AFAIK things are going on within the procedings of the normal civil law and no emergency laws were in effect. Or other human rights violating actions.

They were freed with no bail. And they still have a lawsuite against them.

This doesn’t mean that I am very concerened about them.

Also to highlight Nora’s comment. What she means by a farce is the plagiarist judge trying to silence the three of them by raising a libel case against them.

And of course, it is normal Egyptian custom for people doing a government job or a law enforecement agent to not take his job seriously enough and tries to be highly unprofessional.

we are free now, while this case is primarily mobilized by judge murad as reaction to bloggers exposing his plagiarism. still I think we’ll see more cases like this in the future where the state uses (or benefits from) semi independant agents (al azhar in karim’s case, judge murad in ours etc.) to punish and intimidate bloggers without appearing to directly target them.

also the detain for one day and make release process painful method will be used more and more, after the 100s time it’ll stop being news, we’ll waste most of our energies police stations hoping making sure our friends are safe and technically we are not even detained.

I’m not sure how we should deal with this new situation.