Patrick Zaki’s case has been referred to trial and the first session is scheduled to take place on tomorrow, Tuesday the 14th of September 2021. Patrick is set to appear in-front of the Misdemeanor Court of Al Mansoura, on charges of spreading false news inside and/or outside Egypt that could lead to disturbing public security, spreading terror among the people, or harming the public interest. This means that he is likely to be transferred to Al Mansoura Prison which he was detained in for a few weeks in 2020 and had complained about the detention circumstances there.On account of such charges, Patrick can be imprisoned, fined, or both, facing a sentence of up to 5 years in prison.
According to his lawyers, the referral is solely based on an article that Patrick has written in July, 2019 on the struggle of Coptic minorities in Egypt (please find attached the English translation of the article). He is being tried for speaking his truth about the discrimination and assaults that Christians face in Egypt on daily basis and that are known facts both locally and internationally, he was not spreading rumours or false news and in the article he did not promote any call to action, he only stated facts and put them out there for documentation purposes.
SPEAK UP NOW! The trial is tomorrow, use your voices, spread his words, defend the person who stood by minorities and make sure his suffering stops.
Not a month passes without painful incidents taking place against Egypt’s Copts, from attempts of displacement in Upper Egypt to kidnappings, church closures, or other bombings. This article is a simple attempt to monitor the events of one week in the diaries of Egyptian Christians…
Not a month goes by for Christians in Egypt without 8 to 10 painful incidents, from attempts to displace in Upper Egypt to kidnappings, the closure of a church or other bombings, and the killing of a Christian, the end is always “mentally ill.”
This article is a simple attempt to monitor the events of one week from the diaries of the Christians of Egypt, one week is enough to realize the extent of the ordeal that surrounds them…
On the first day of last Eid al-Fitr, Egypt witnessed a huge terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of fourteen Egyptians from the Egyptian forces, with their various ranks in the police and army. As no Christian recruit was named, we were surprised by the news of a military funeral in the hometown of one of the Egyptian Christian soldiers, Abanoub Marzouk from the village of Bani Qurra, which is affiliated to the Qusiya Center in Assiut.
I wrote a blog post, in which I asked about the reasons for this blackout around the name of Abanoub. I faced a number of attacks from the users of social networking sites, as well as from Egyptian journalists, who confirmed that these things are “normal”, because the armed forces do not publish the names of those who are martyred in terrorist incidents in Sinai for security reasons and the morale of the troops there. All this pressure led me to delete the post. I said I might have misjudged it, and it wasn’t an act of discrimination, and I apologized to colleagues for this post.
Hours later, news spread of raging problems in the birthplace of the conscript, Abanoub Marzouk, whose name the armed forces decided to name one of its schools, because the people of the city prevented the implementation of this decision decisively, because the conscript is “Christian.” The Egyptian media did not shed enough light on the issue, but a number of Christian journalists and activists voiced their objections.
Nader Shukri, a journalist interested in Christian affairs in Egypt, wrote: “A governor says to the brother of martyr Abanoub Naheh, that if I came to a wedding, gifting newlyweds 10 pounds, don’t say I should give them 100 pounds. This is his response to the refusal of a martyr’s brother to put the name on a bridge that is just a passage over a canal,” pointing out that this sign is not commensurate with the value of honoring a soldier who fell in a terrorist accident. Then Ishaq Ibrahim, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, commented on Facebook: “Those who refused to give the name Abanoub to a school are neither from the Muslim brotherhood, nor Salafis, nor hardliners, or anything. Be brave and say that it is a state official with discriminatory convictions that influenced his decisions. Any talk of blaming religious groups is a dilution of responsibility.” Then he added: “Assiut Governorate, after criticizing its behavior in not putting the name of the martyr Abanoub on a school, they put his name next to a small bridge in his village on one of the canals, despite the opposition of the
