Early last February, 26-year-old Hafsa Halawa was visiting her sister in the UK when she finally found out what she had dreaded for weeks. Back in Egypt, where Halawa worked as an election observer, she had been sent to trial – along with 42 other democracy advocates – ostensibly for being employed by a foreign NGO that had not been properly registered.
British-born, raised in Plymouth, and the daughter of a retired NHS surgeon, Halawa could have stayed put; the charge was clearly politicised. The 43 had taught parliamentary candidates how to campaign, or monitored poll counts. But that day investigators claimed they were foreign spies, and sought to jail them on an administrative technicality. Previously an MP had called for them to be executed. Under earlier interrogation, Halawa herself had been accused of flouting the Geneva conventions.
That day in February 2012, Halawa had a choice: she could stay safely in Britain, or – being half-Egyptian and fiercely patriotic – return to Egypt to face the possibility of jail. Her mother, whose own father had fled death threats in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, told her to stay. Family friends, who had been jailed under Mubarak, agreed. "Everyone said: 'stay, stay, stay'," she remembered this week. "Don't you dare come back."
But she came back. "I was very adamant that: no, I was employed as an Egyptian, so I'll be investigated and interrogated as an Egyptian," said Halawa. "Plus, I hadn't done anything wrong. Even if this went the whole way, it seemed impossible that I'd be found guilty."
But last week, after an 18-month trial, Halawa was sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for three years. It was not quite what Halawa had expected in mid-2011, when she left law school in Britain to help rebuild post-revolutionary Egypt. After joining the National Democratic Institute (NDI, an NGO that promotes the democratic process), she spent the next six months training Egypt's new political parties, and leading poll observers in southern Egypt.
On 29 December, she was preparing to return to Cairo, and called a colleague at head office. "She said: there's a lot of police outside, let me call you back. She never did."
At that moment, dozens of armed policemen had burst into NDI's headquarters – along with those of 17 other Cairo NGOs – and over the next six hours seized files and computers. Earlier that year, the US government had paid grants worth $65m directly to the NGOs concerned – circumventing the relevant Cairo authorities. Furious and suspicious, an Egyptian minister retaliated with the raids and, later, the trial.
The case was considered so politicised that, within weeks, all but two of the 28 foreign-born defendants had secretly fled the country on a private plane. Halawa was one of the two who stayed. The other was NDI's Robert Becker, a former Democratic campaigner, who felt that the remaining Egyptian defendants would be forgotten if the Americans all left.
Becker was fired by NDI a few days later. And while Halawa and her Egyptian colleagues remained on the payroll, it was hard to find new work. With NDI on her CV, no similar group dared employ her. But despite family advice, she remains in Egypt to fight on.
"Hafsa and the other Egyptians that I shared a cage with for 18 months are some of the most courageous people I've ever seen," said Becker, who escaped to Italy only once he had finally been sentenced to jail last Tuesday. "She certainly could have left. She cares deeply about the future direction of her country, and I applaud her for staying."
For the moment, Halawa and her fellow defendants are still jobless and in limbo while they decide whether and how to appeal. But in the meantime, they have an even greater concern: a new NGO law, currently passing through Egypt's senate, that may be even harsher than the one she was convicted under... read more:
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