Nine human rights organizations called for the immediate release of writer and activist Ahmed Douma, marking the 8th anniversary of his imprisonment in December 2013.
Fatima Siraj, a member of Douma's defense team, said in media statements that the defense team resorted to two legal tracks in an attempt to extract a decision to release her client: the first track is two related requests;
A request to the Prisons Authority and a request to the attorney general. The first is a request for Douma’s conditional release because he has served half the term.
As for the second track, it is a request for what is technically known as coercion, i.e. that the penalty for the criminal accusation against the accused supersedes the penalty issued against him for committing a misdemeanor, and then this contributes to the issuance of a decision of conditional pardon, considering that he has served half the sentence.
Douma was arrested at the end of 2013, against the background of his presence before that in the vicinity of Abdeen Court, during a demonstration against the protest law.
He was sentenced - along with Ahmed Maher and Muhammad Adel - to 3 years in prison, and 3 years to police surveillance.
Before the expiry of the sentence, the judiciary began looking into the case of the Council of Ministers “to thwart his release from prison,” according to the statement of the nine organizations, yesterday, Saturday, a case in which he was sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of 17 million pounds, before Doma appealed the ruling, and the trial is repeated before A new department sentenced him to 15 years in prison and fined him 6 million Egyptian pounds.