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Ahmed Seif, whose experience of torture as a political prisoner in Egyptinspired him to become a leading human rights lawyer defending leftists, Islamists, atheists and gays, died on Wednesday in Cairo. He was 63.
His family said the cause was complications from heart surgery.
Crowds leaving the cemetery after his funeral on Thursday held up banners calling him “the sword of the people” and “the exemplary fighter.” Among them were his son, Alaa Abdel Fattah, and his daughter Sanaa Seif, who were temporarily released from prisons to attend the ceremony. They have been incarcerated for protesting repression by the Egyptian government.
In his funeral remarks, Mr. Fattah was defiant. “My father died a martyr, and you know who killed him,” he said, according to The Associated Press. He referred to the stress caused by the arrest of Mr. Seif’s children and the postponement of necessary surgery because of judicial procedures.
Mr. Seif was himself imprisoned at least four times, twice during the rule of President Anwar el-Sadat and twice under President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in 2011.
Mr. Seif’s contrarian nature, for good and ill, defined his career. In 2011, he found himself in the familiar position of being under arrest, this time for participating in protests against President Mubarak. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then Egypt’s defense minister and now its president, was touring the prison and stopped to tell a group of prisoners that included Mr. Seif that people should respect the military leadership, stop protesting and go home.
Mr. Seif replied that Mr. Mubarak was corrupt. Mr. Sisi “became angry, his face became red,” Mr. Seif was quoted as saying in the newspaper The Guardian. “He lost it.”
That incarceration lasted only 48 hours. In the 1980s, he was jailed for five years for joining a left-wing group. He endured beatings and electrical shocks, and he came to detest torture as “a form of cancer that can eat up a country’s youth and stifle its ability to change, criticize, reform and rebel,” he said.
He responded by studying law while in prison. After his release, he apprenticed with a law firm and started volunteering to do legal work for causes he supported. In 1983, he handled the case of Nasr Abu Zayd, a liberal professor who was denied a promotion by Cairo University because of his views. Mr. Zayd was convicted of apostasy and forced to divorce his wife because under Islamic law a Muslim woman cannot be married to an apostate.
Mr. Seif took many unpopular clients, including Islamists with whom he fundamentally disagreed. In 2001, he represented 52 men who were arrested aboard a floating gay nightclub moored on the Nile and charged with “habitual debauchery.” Despite worldwide criticism of the prosecution, 23 of the men were convicted and sent to prison.
In 2004, Mr. Seif represented men accused of bomb attacks on tourist hotels in the Sinai Peninsula that killed 34 people. He did not defend the bombings, but argued that the men should have been exonerated because they were tortured to get confessions. Three were sentenced to death, and 10 received lesser sentences.
Two years later, Mr. Seif defended a blogger, Kareem Amer, who was prosecuted on charges of antireligious remarks and insults to President Mubarak. He was the first blogger in Egypt explicitly arrested for the content of his writing. Mr. Amer was sentenced to several years in prison, where he was beaten, according to human rights groups.
Ahmed Seif al-Islam Hamad was born on Jan. 9, 1951, in the delta province of Beheira in Egypt. His father, he said, belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose fundamentalist ideology was far removed from the leftist views the son adopted. He earned degrees in politics and economics and in law at Cairo University. In a biography on the Human Rights Watch website, he said he joined an underground Communist organization.
But politics, he decided, was not enough. During his five years in jail in the 1980s, he said, “I made a decision that it was no use to have political activity without human rights.”
He continued: “The Communists would say secretly, ‘It doesn’t matter if the Islamists are tortured.’ And the Islamists would say, ‘Why not torture Communists?’ ”
The solution was to make basic rights a part of the law, and Mr. Seif gave even Mr. Mubarak credit for moving in that direction, if only for “cosmetic purposes,” Mr. Seif said. In 1999, he helped found the Hisham Mubarak Law Center to support people whose human rights had been violated. It was named for one of Egypt’s first human rights lawyers.
In the cascade of events that have rocked Egypt over the past few years, the center coordinated demonstrations as well as legal representation for arrested protesters. It also trained a new generation of rights lawyers.
Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was elected president after Mr. Mubarak’s fall from power, named Mr. Seif to a commission to investigate the arrests and military court trials that occurred in the 18 months before Mr. Morsi took office. The panel recommended a general amnesty, which Mr. Morsi accepted. Mr. Morsi was ousted in 2013 in a military takeover and succeeded by Mr. Sisi.
Mr. Seif’s wife, Laila Soueif, is a university mathematics professor with a long history of activism. His other daughter, Mona Seif, is a leader of a movement to end the practice of trying civilians in military courts.
When his son was imprisoned last January, Mr. Seif acknowledged in a news conference that his dreams had fallen short.
“I wanted you to inherit a democratic society that guards your rights, my son,” he said, “but instead I passed on the prison cell that held me, and now holds you.”
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Ahmed Seif Al Islam was a veteran Egyptian lawyer, activist and former political prisoner. Arrested and tortured by State Security Investigations officers in 1983 for his political activity, he served five years in prison. Founder of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, which since 2008 has been the leading Egyptian nongovernmental organization providing legal assistance to protesters. The Hisham Mubarak Law Centre monitored state violence during the 2011 protests, and became a gathering place for human rights activists during the revolution. Ahmed Seif was arrested by Military Intelligence with his staff at the height of the protests.© 2011 Platon for Human Rights Watch
Egypt has just lost one of its human rights pioneers, and Human Rights Watch has lost a dear friend, with the passing of Ahmed Seif Al Islam on August 27, 2014, following his hospitalization for heart ailments. Seif – as his friends in the movement usually addressed him – was a founder and long-time director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC), named after another early human rights activist who died at a tragically young age.
Joe Stork is the deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
Egypt has just lost one of its human rights pioneers, and Human Rights Watch has lost a dear friend, with the passing of Ahmed Seif Al Islam on August 27, 2014, following his hospitalization for heart ailments. Seif – as his friends in the movement usually addressed him – was a founder and long-time director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC), named after another early human rights activist who died at a tragically young age.
Seif, a human rights lawyer, was on the legal defense team in numerous high-profile trials of human rights, labor, and more broadly political activists in the Hosni Mubarak years, but he was above all an activist himself. The HMLC was more often than not the coordinating center for planning peaceful demonstrations and then, invariably, for deploying lawyers to various detention centers in response to the usual mass arrests that followed such events. Their office on a six-floor walk-up in Bab al-Luq (the elevator more often than not was inoperable) was close to the main courthouse, the General Prosecutor’s office, and the Lawyers Syndicate, and was Cairo’s networking site par excellence, even with the advent of social media. This was the case for instance when security forces raided the HMLC offices on the morning of February 3, 2011, and arrested Seif along with 30 other lawyers, activists, and human rights defenders gathered there, including then-Human Rights Watch researcher Dan Williams.
Seif lived and breathed a deep commitment to human rights and peaceful political activism, though he did not hesitate to represent in court persons accused of political violence. Human rights was not something confined to his crowded office at the HMLC. His wife, Leila Soueif, teaches mathematics at Cairo University and was a leader in the March 9 movement of professors and others promoting academic freedom. His son and daughter, Alaa Abdel-Fattah and Sanaa Seif, have been in jail since June 11 and June 21 respectively for participating in peaceful protests despite the draconian assembly law decreed in November 2013.
I visited Seif in his home in May 2013; an inveterate cigarette smoker, he was recovering from a respiratory ailment at the time. Then-President Mohamed Morsy had appointed Seif to serve on a commission looking into arrests and military court trials of protesters under the 18-month reign of the Supreme Committee of the Armed Forces (SCAF) between the February 2011 departure of Hosni Mubarak and Morsy’s taking office on June 30, 2012, following his election a few weeks earlier. President Morsy accepted the commission’s recommendation of a general amnesty for all such convictions and dropping charges against those not yet brought to trial. Seif was a firm opponent of military court trials for any civilians. “We came under a lot of pressure from the Interior Ministry on the one hand and revolutionaries on the other, that this or that ‘thug’ should not be pardoned,” he told me then. “My view was that these people were not threats to society.”
In a conversation I had with Seif several years ago, in February 2007, he told me how he became engaged in human rights activism and lawyering:
“I didn’t start in human rights. I started as a Communist in an underground organization. I was tortured in 1983. Under torture I had to give a lot of information. I was turned into a wreck of a human being. A small example: each time I had a meal of torture, there was the sound of a bell. Since then, whenever I hear the sound of a bell my body shakes.”
“At that time I made a decision that it was no use to have political activity without dealing with human rights. I was sentenced to five years in prison. During this period I studied law. I left jail in 1989, November I think. By December I was a member of the Bar, and active in the Lawyers’ Syndicate. After two years as an apprentice, I started volunteer work on issues of freedoms and rights. The first time was during the Kafr al-Dawwar site of major textile industries strikes in 1994, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’s apostasy case.”
“I was not a member of any organization then. I wanted an organization to which I could fully commit myself. At that time also I didn’t have that much time to give. I started my career at the age of 40. It was necessary to focus on practicing law. What ended my hesitation was the trade union elections in 1996. I asked Hisham Mubarak, who had recently started the Center for Human Rights Legal Assistance, or CHRLA, ‘What do you intend to do regarding the elections?’ He said, ‘We don’t have anyone to take this responsibility.’ He told me I could volunteer.”
“The elections were over in November 1996. By then I was full time. This didn’t just open the door to work with labor unions. It opened constitutional cases. Those are among the most important things with which HMLC deals. I’ve been part of HMLC from the beginning. Among its principle goals is to challenge the government’s efforts to control human rights groups.”
Our 2007 conversation ended with Seif’s reflections on the state of human rights activism in Egypt at that time.
“Our greatest accomplishment is that rights issues are part of the domestic agenda, and in the state, in their discourse, in academic research, in the media, and the legal profession. We managed to create a social consensus against torture. That didn’t exist 10 years ago. The Communists would say secretly, ‘It doesn’t matter if Islamists are tortured.’ And the Islamists would say, ‘Why not torture communists?’ In the last five years you don’t hear this from anyone. The government created the National Council for Human Rights – responding to external pressures, for cosmetic purposes, but also responding to the situation in the country. The acceptance of several sectors of the Egyptian society to have foreign monitoring of elections, or monitoring by rights groups, this is now a demand of most political currents. The quantity of complaints that citizens make to rights groups, I don’t think the groups suffer from any lack of work! All organizations, no matter how new, have a problem of excessive expectations in terms of their capacity. This is despite all the counter-propaganda the government puts out with the help of others – like underground Communist organizations that see us as some kind of American clone. They are very dear friends, whom I also defend of course. And when I go to defend them, they don’t object.”
I asked Seif in 2007 about his thoughts on the fact that the growth of human rights activism coincided, roughly, with the ascendancy of political Islam.
“I am the wrong person to answer this question. My father was a former Muslim Brother. The first person to defend us when we were tortured in 1983 was a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated lawyer. WhileAl Ahali, the leftist-secularist Tagammu` newspaper, refused to publish anything about our case! This taught me a lesson – that torture is something that must concern all of us no matter who is the victim. I thank my lawyer for this lesson. He probably doesn’t know how he changed me.”
“Within the Islamist groups, it is possible to find activists who see things the way we do regarding human rights, because they suffer a lot from violations. You find problems when it comes to rights that are sensitive – for example, freedom of belief. But we work with everybody: we defend Islamists the same way we defend Communists. At the same time we defend homosexuals, or people accused of insulting religion. So we don’t get attacked by the Islamists. We are playing a principled role in so many varied cases. People interested in these cases know the scope of what we are doing. This makes us acceptable. ‘OK, they’re crazy,’ they say about us. ‘Fine!’”
The death of Ahmad Seif now, when Egypt needs a strong human rights movement perhaps more than ever, comes at a great loss to his colleagues and co-defenders in Egypt and beyond. It is a terrible time not to have Seif’s counsel, because the best of Egypt today owes so much to Seif’s exemplary life and achievements.
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Ahmed Seif , also written as Ahmad Saif (el-Islam Hamad Abd el-Fattah) ( January 9 , 1951 - August 27, 2014 ) [1] , was an Egyptian journalist and human rights lawyer.
Seif was in the eighties, a five-year prison sentence for activism. Even then he was still several times down for political reasons, including during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. [2] [3] [4] In 1999 he was one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law . In 2011 he was leader of the political movement Kefaya . [2] [3]
He is father of two prominent activists during the Egyptian Revolution, Mona Seif and Alaa Abd El Fattah . Seif is married to Laila Soueif , a professor of mathematics at the University of Cairo which many protests helped late 20th and early 21st century organization in Egypt. [2] [5]
Biography [ edit ]
Because Seifs involvement in the socialist movement, he was arrested in 1983 and tortured by agents of the Egyptian security forces. For five years he was in prison and since his release, he focused on the fight against torture in Egypt.Already in 1989, shortly after his release, he took one of the most important human rights issues in the country itself. [6]Because of his struggle against torture and injustice he grew over the years into a central figure in several successful Egyptian human rights cases. [2]
In 1999 he was one of the founders of the Centre Hisham Mubarak for Law in Cairo , [6] a center named for Hisham Mubarak , a lawyer who had focused on since the early nineties until his death, human rights and the granting of legal assistance to victims of violations of it. [5] [7]
He was one of the attorneys in the case against fifteen defendants after the bombing in Taba and other places in the Sinai in October 2004, he turned on the one hand strongly against the wave of bombings, but on the other hand argued that they in no way torture or other violations justification of human rights. Nevertheless, all fifteen convicted on the basis of confessions obtained during the torture. [6] Other high-profile cases with other lawyers instance were the Queen Boat case in 2001 in which 52 men were tried on the basis of their sexual orientation, and the defense of 49 textile workers because they had participated in protests on April 6, 2008 in Part Mahalla .
In 2006 he took on the defense of Karim Amer , the first blogger who was indicted for a crime because of his criticism of the Internet on President Hosni Mubarak andIslam . Amer was sentenced to four years imprisonment in this case. [6] [8]
Seif died on August 27, 2014 at the age of 63 after he during open-heart surgery in a coma was hit. [1]
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Ahmed Seif , also written as Ahmad Saif (el-Islam Hamad Abd el-Fattah) (January 9, 1951 - August 27, 2014), was an Egyptian journalist and human rights lawyer.
In the 1980s, Seif served a five-year prison sentence for activism. Afterwards, he was still several times imprisoned for political reasons, including during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law. In 2011, he was also leader of the political movement Kefaya.
Seif was the father of two prominent activists during the Egyptian Revolution, Mona Seif and Alaa Abd El Fattah. Seif married to Laila Soueif, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cairo.
Because of Seif's involvement in the socialist movement, he was arrested in 1983 and tortured by agents of the Egyptian security forces. For five years, he was in prison. After his release, Seif focused on the fight against torture in Egypt. In 1989, shortly after his release, he took on one of the most important human rights issues in the country itself. Because of his struggle against torture and injustice he grew over the years into a central figure in several successful Egyptian human rights cases.
In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Centre Hisham Mubarak for Law in Cairo, a center named for Hisham Mubarak, a lawyer who had focused on human rights and the granting of legal assistance to victims of violations of human rights laws.
Seif was one of the attorneys in the case against fifteen defendants after the bombing in Taba and other places in the Sinai in October 2004. Seif argued strongly against the wave of bombings while. on the other hand, arguing that the defendants in no way tortured of engaged in violations of human rights. Nevertheless, all fifteen defendants were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained during their torture.
Other high-profile cases with other lawyers were the Queen Boat case in 2001, in which 52 men were tried on the basis of their sexual orientation, and the defense of 49 textile workers because they had participated in protests on April 6, 2008 in Mahalla.
In 2006, Seif took on the defense of Karim Amer, the first blogger who was indicted for a crime because of his criticism, on the Internet, of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Islam. Amer was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Seif died on August 27, 2014 at the age of 63 during open-heart surgery.
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