A lower court earlier sentenced him to two years in jail, but now the writer will be re-tried.
Ahmed Naji won his appeal against the lower court’s ruling. The conviction was vacated. According to the initial sentence, the writer was to serve two years in jail for publishing an extract from a novel with references to sex and drugs. The Egyptian authorities charged him with “violating public modesty”.
The writer was initially convicted for publishing “provocative content” in the state-run culture magazine Akhbar Al-Adab. An extract from his novel The Use of Life was published in late 2015. In January, Naji and the magazine’s editor Tarek El Taher were tried. Both were acquitted, but prosecutors appealed against the court’s decision. They were found guilty and fined. The writer was also sentenced to two years in jail.
The case was re-tried, and the court ordered in December to release Naji pending a final ruling. The trial was postponed several times until the court overturned the earlier conviction and set a new trial. Naji’s case will be heard by a different court, Ahram Online reports.
The writer’s lawyer Khaled Ali says the court’s decision means that Naji spent a long time in prison though he was innocent. “He did nothing but offer excellent work,” the lawyer told Egypt Independent
Ahmed Naji began to serve his two-year term in a Cairo prison last February. He had spent 10 months in prison until his sentence was suspended pending his appeal. After the release in late December, Naji was banned from leaving Egypt.
The writer faced prosecution after a reader of Akhbar Al-Adab complained to the law-enforcement agencies that extracts from Naji’s novel gave him “heart palpitations and a drop in blood pressure”. Naji’s supporters claim the charges and conviction were politically motivated and caused by the censored topics he raised.
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