The Egyptian court that sentenced to death at the end of June a man who murdered a student before the cameras of spectators because she refused his advances demanded this Sunday that his execution be broadcast live.
This trial, dispatched over two days, was particularly publicized: first, the video of Nayera Achraf’s knife murder in front of her university was shared massively online, then the trial of her murderer, Mohammed Adel, was, extremely rarely, filmed and even broadcast live by some media.
Furthermore, the case had sparked debate beyond Egypt because a few days later Nayera Achraf, a Jordanian student, Imane Erchid, was shot dead in Amman, probably for the same reasons.
Request a live broadcast of the performance
The Mansoura court, 130 km north of Cairo, which handed down the death penalty a month after the crime, demanded a derogation from the Court of Appeal this Sunday to be able to broadcast the execution live.
In its request, the court considers that “dissemination, even if it is only of the beginning of the procedure, could allow dissuading the greatest number.”
It also asks Parliament to amend the law to authorize these broadcasts more frequently.
Egypt is the country that imposes the most death sentences, according to Amnesty International, and in 2021 it carried out the third highest number of executions in the world. But these sentences are never carried out in public or live, with rare exceptions. In 1998, for example, three men who killed a woman and her children during a robbery were executed live on television.
A bill aimed at restricting the rights of women
Several femicides have made headlines in Egypt in recent weeks, including that of a television presenter, Chaïma Gamal. Her husband, a judge of the Council of State, is currently appearing after an alleged “accomplice” denounced him almost three weeks after denouncing his disappearance, according to the prosecution.
In March, a teenager received a five-year suspended prison sentence for the suicide of a high school student whom he blackmailed by posting nude photomontages of her online.
If a quarter of the government and a third of Parliament are women, for feminists this is just a façade since that did not prevent the government from proposing -unsuccessfully- at the beginning of 2021 a bill aimed at restricting the rights of the nearly 50 million Egyptian women by allowing, for example, their father or brothers to annul their marriage.
Source: BFM TV
