With all its leaders absent, the headquarters of Egypt’s Karama Party hosted a conference by the “Hope Current” party on the case of its founders’ representative and former head of the Karama Party, Ahmed Tantawy, commenting on the ruling imprisoning him, his campaign manager, lawyer Mohamed Abu El-Diyar, and 21 campaign members, on charges of printing election papers without authorisation from the competent authorities.
During the conference, the Hope Current party (under formation), in a statement delivered by the coordinator of the party’s founding committee, Alaa El-Khayam, stressed that the battle to collect endorsements to found the party will continue despite the difficulty, calling on all who believe in change to join, and saying that the party will keep engaging with all issues and communicating with all national forces with common ground to form a strong national alliance.
El-Khayam stresses that both the party and Tantawy “are not asking for a presidential pardon”, because Tantawy, Abu El-Diyar and their comrades committed no crime for which to seek a pardon; they exercised their constitutional right in trying to run for the presidency. At the same time, he thanked all the national forces that issued solidarity statements requesting a presidential pardon, pointing out that the Hope Current party is not responsible for these statements or their content.
El-Khayam explains that Tantawy is still the founders’ representative of the party, and that the legal position on this has not yet been settled, pointing out that they had expected the decision to arrest them, “because we are facing a regime that does not believe in elections or peaceful transition. True, things were cruder than expected, but the party’s current role is to resist in order to secure the party’s endorsements; everyone who believes in change must resist, and every gain and change that Ahmed and his comrades achieve will benefit future experiences”.
On the National Dialogue and the party’s participation in it, the coordinator of the founding committee comments: “The dialogue has turned into a chat, not a national dialogue. There were demands that the national movement signed in order to take part in the National Dialogue, which Tantawy signed as head of the Karama Party at the time, including releasing detainees and amending the pretrial detention law, and these demands have not been met in the first phase of the National Dialogue so far. No sensible person would agree to take part in a dialogue just to chat.”
The Family’s Position Is Firm
In the same context, the party’s media spokesperson and Ahmed Tantawy’s wife, broadcaster Rasha Kandil, said that the position of Ahmed and his family is clear: they are asking for justice, not a pardon, and if he is recycled into other cases, the position has been set in advance, which is to refuse to seek a health-based pardon.
On the impact of the imprisonment of Tantawy and his comrades on the Hope Current party, Kandil says that the political scene, which is witnessing the removal of anyone trying to plant hope in political and human rights life, whether Tantawy, the manager of his banned election campaign, Mohamed Abu El-Diyar, or their comrades, is far from the end of the road Tantawy chose and decided to follow to its end, whether the end of the road or his own end, explaining that the days following his arrest were the days in which the party received the most applications to join.
The Civil Movement Absent from the Hope Current Conference
During the conference, which most leaders of the Civil Democratic Movement did not attend, apart from Medhat El-Zahed, head of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, and Khaled Dawoud, a leader in the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, human rights lawyer and member of Tantawy’s defence team Khaled Ali said that the article under which the Hope Current founders’ representative is being tried was introduced because of the “rotating ballot” used to rig elections, the ballot paper being an official document. In Tantawy’s case, however, the popular endorsements are not used in the electoral process; they are preparatory papers for it.
He adds: The article under which he is being tried deprives him of his political right to run for five years, and requires that the candidate has benefited from the printed election papers, which did not happen in Tantawy’s case, because he did not submit his candidacy papers.
Ali explains that there is a difference between political endorsements and legal endorsements, because informal endorsements are a political practice that gives the candidate political legitimacy only, not legal legitimacy. It is like a lawyer obtaining an informal power of attorney from someone: it is not recognised in court, and the penalty is not referral to trial but simply that it is not recognised.
The defence team member explains that during the trial sessions, the court asked one of the campaign members about the forms of restriction in issuing endorsements, a question he was keen to have answered even if the court did not take it into account. So a group of researchers collected the decisions and figures on the collection of endorsements in the 2014, 2018 and 2023 elections, to show how restrictions were imposed in the latest electoral process. For example, the period available to collect endorsements was 21 days in 2014 and 22 days in 2018, while the 2023 elections had the shortest period, only 20 days. The number of notary offices available to issue endorsements was also the lowest in the 2023 elections, at only 217 offices, compared with 350 offices nationwide in 2014, while 2018 had the highest number, 390 notary offices nationwide.
Despite the small number of notary offices, and the load-shedding crisis that affected their work, the average time taken to issue one endorsement in the latest elections was the shortest, at 85 seconds, because each office issued about 492 endorsements a day, whereas in 2014 a notary office issued 30 endorsements at an average of 14 minutes each, and in the 2018 elections each office issued 132 endorsements a day at an average of three and a half minutes.
He stresses that Tantawy is being punished not only for considering running in the presidential election, but for his overall performance in parliament and the Tiran and Sanafir issue, pointing out that this case was first set in motion by a Ministry of Interior statement alleging forgery in the endorsements, yet the prosecution could not charge any defendant with forgery, so the investigation report speaks of preparing for forgery, and adds all the usual charges in such political cases, such as calling for the overthrow of the government, protesting and unlawful assembly; the aim of the case is to impose silence on everyone by force of law.
In the same context, defence team member Ahmed Kenawy says that the case of Ahmed and his comrades is the flimsiest case in law he has seen in 40 years of practising law, and although he expected a conviction, anyone with knowledge would realise there is no case at all. He adds: “Tantawy is being punished under Article 65 of the Law on the Exercise of Political Rights, which requires a candidate who benefits from the printing of election papers, and Ahmed is not an official candidate. The article also requires the printed papers to be used in the electoral process, and the papers for which Tantawy and his comrades are being tried are not used in the electoral process. This is not interpretation; it is stated in Article 12 of the Law on the Exercise of Political Rights: a candidate must submit several papers preparatory to the electoral process, such as a birth certificate, qualification, endorsements and a declaration that the applicant is Egyptian, all of which are preparatory papers not used in the election process. The matter did not even require the Public Prosecution to obtain confirmation from the National Election Authority that these papers are not used in the electoral process.”
Kenawy explains that the police investigations set out to find anything to convict Tantawy and his campaign, so they started by talking about forgery, but these papers are not official and there is no forgery crime involved, so they turned to the charge of overthrowing the constitutional authority by armed force. He points out that in Mohamed Abu El-Diyar’s case, “we were surprised that the ruling was issued without responding to the defence team and its requests”, and the ruling was enforced and he was arrested inside the courtroom.
Although El-Khayam and Kandil stressed their refusal to request a presidential pardon for Ahmed and his comrades, Khaled Dawoud, former spokesperson of the Civil Movement, said that all paths should be pursued, and if a number of heads of Egyptian parties see fit to call for a presidential pardon to preserve the internal front, they have the right to do so.
In an exclusive statement to Zawia3, Rasha Kandil says that “the current political moment is one of alignment and sorting among those taking part in the Egyptian political movement”, pointing out that 40 human rights and political figures had been invited, and that the current project is not Tantawy’s alone but the project of all who believe in the third way and the peaceful transfer of power, “and I believe there is no logic in not standing with this project, whoever’s it is”.
She considered upholding the ruling against Ahmed and his comrades a naive attempt to abort the Hope Current project, which will not happen, because the party’s founders’ representative left it a plan that will last for years, “and we are receiving thousands of applications to join the party”, and his tasks as founders’ representative have been distributed, pointing out that the defence team is awaiting the court’s reasoning to pursue the case.
On 31 May, the United Nations expressed deep concern over the imprisonment of Egyptian opposition politician Ahmed Tantawy and called for his immediate release.
Marta Hurtado, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement: “We are deeply concerned by the decision of the Cairo Court of Appeal on 27 May to uphold the one-year prison sentence with labour against former MP and would-be presidential candidate Ahmed Tantawy and 22 of his supporters.”
The case dates back to last October, when presidential candidate Ahmed Tantawy called on his supporters to fill out popular endorsements, after announcing in mid-October that he had obtained only 14,000 of the 25,000 endorsements required to run, because his supporters were prevented from registering endorsements for him. He, his campaign manager and a number of campaign members were referred to trial in November, before the first-instance ruling was issued in February.
