Céline Lebrun-Shaath has not seen her husband for over a year and a half. Over three months since she was able to speak to him on the phone. “I only have indirect news through his sister and his daughter and it seems that he is doing well,” she told the Point, in his thin voice. Figure of the revolution of January 25, 2011, her husband, Ramy Shaath, has been imprisoned for seventeen months in the Tora detention center, located in Cairo. The 49-year-old political activist is being held there in spartan conditions: a 25 square meter cell for 17 inmates, and no medical treatment despite having cholesterol problems and suffering from an ulcer.
Their last meeting dates back to July 5, 2019, when a dozen hooded agents burst into the couple’s home in the middle of the night. “They were heavily armed and searched our apartment from top to bottom even though they had no arrest warrant,” she recalls. Dressed in simple pajamas, her husband then keeps asking them about their motivations, in vain. Faced with the silence of the security forces, Céline Lebrun-Shaath asks to benefit from the consular protection which is due to her as a French citizen. One of the agents approaches her and whispers to her, in a threatening tone: “You’re going to the airport!” You have ten minutes to pack your suitcase. “On the advice of her husband, the young thirty-something complies. “Eight years of a life in ten minutes! »She laments, still inconsolable. At the bottom of her building, a van awaits the Frenchwoman. Another is reserved for her husband. “That’s when I realized they had come to stop him. Céline Lebrun-Shaath was expelled the next morning from Egyptian territory. “It’s a bigger deal than your simple case. These are state policies ”, we simply slipped in by way of farewell.
Prosecuted for “belonging to a terrorist group”, “spreading false information and attacking the security of the country”, Ramy Shaath has since been detained “preventively” pending the results of the investigation. His imprisonment is renewed every 45 days during expeditious hearings where the accused sometimes appears in a glass cage alongside other defendants. “The problem is that the investigation is not ongoing,” said his wife. “My husband only underwent one interrogation on July 6, 2019 in the state security office. He was asked for whom he had voted in the presidential elections and if he had demonstrated in 2011 and 2013 against power, which is all that is most legitimate for an Egyptian citizen. ”
Ramy Shaath is however not a citizen like the others. Son of former Palestinian Prime Minister Nabil Shaath and Egyptian activist Safaa Zeitoun, this Egyptian-Palestinian binational national is a recognized political activist in Egypt. An actor in the Egyptian Spring, this left-wing activist worked to create liberal and progressive movements in the aftermath of the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In particular, in 2012 he co-founded the Constitution Party, alongside Mohamed el-Baradei, former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Nobel Peace Prize 2005.
60,000 political prisoners
The recent history of Egypt changes in June 2013. Large-scale demonstrations across the country call for the fall of President Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, accused of wanting to Islamize the country. Fearing an intervention by the Egyptian army, Ramy Shaath refuses to participate. However, on July 3, 2013, the military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew the first democratically elected Egyptian head of state. At the head of the transitional power, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, now Marshal, was voted into the presidency of the country in 2014, and re-elected in 2018. But, at the helm of the State, the former Minister of Defense of Mohamed Morsi , who died in prison in June 2019, is illustrated by an implacable repression. According to NGOs, Egypt has a total of nearly 60,000 political prisoners.
“My husband has absolutely no link with the Muslim Brotherhood, like most Egyptian prisoners accused of supporting terrorism,” Céline Lebrun-Shaath insists today. “All the people who were able to play a role, near or far, in the demonstrations of 2011 were arrested. We are facing a government which fears letting the slightest opposition express itself democratically and peacefully, which is a mark of weakness and shows a lack of popular support. Her husband, however, also seems to be paying for his role in the rise in Egypt of the controversial Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for an economic boycott of Israel in order to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Ten days before his arrest, the Egyptian-Palestinian activist, former adviser to Yasser Arafat, had sharply criticized the presence of Egyptian officials at a conference in Bahrain on economic normalization with the Hebrew state organized in the wake of the “peace plan” by Donald Trump on the Middle East. “The date of my husband’s arrest leaves us to think that there is a link with his remarks on the conference and that the Egyptian authorities did not appreciate them,” slips his wife.
Strategic partnership
Now condemned to fight for the release of her husband from France, where she teaches political science, Céline Lebrun-Shaath has been trying for a year and a half to educate the French authorities on the fate of her husband. “French diplomacy remains in the register of words and acts too little even though it has the means to make Egypt listen to reason, in particular by making trade agreements conditional on respect for human rights”, considers the young woman. This is to say if she apprehended the visit to Paris of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi.
During a joint press conference organized this Monday, Emmanuel Macron did indeed pronounce the name of her husband in front of his Egyptian counterpart. “We exchanged lists of names [de prisonniers], including that of Ramy Shaath. These are cases that we are monitoring vigilantly ”, declared the French president, while refusing to link the economic contracts with Egypt to the political situation in the country. “It is a relief to have been able to hear Emmanuel Macron say that he had brought the case of my husband to President Al-Sissi”, reacts Céline Lebrun-Shaath, before, however, to qualify: “Unfortunately, I have afraid that words are not enough. “
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