France on Tuesday joined Britain and the Netherlands in summoning the Egyptian ambassadors, after UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said she was “shocked and alarmed” by the ruling.
Amnesty International also spoke of a “dark day for media freedom in Egypt”, and Human Rights Watch said the verdict showed “how Egypt’s judges have been caught up in the anti-Muslim Brotherhood hysteria fostered by President al-Sisi”.
But reactions remained limited to verbal objections, as no Western capital can afford severing ties with Egypt, the first Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel and a strategic US ally in the Middle East.
A day before the ruling, US officials announced that $572 million (420 million euros) in aid, frozen since October, had been released to Egypt after a green light from Congress.
The Al-Jazeera ruling is the latest issue in Egypt to concern human rights groups since a 2011 uprising toppled long-time autocratic president Hosni Mubarak.
And since Morsi’s ouster on July 3 last year, political unrest has reached unprecedented levels in Egypt, with more than 1,400 people killed and at least 15,000 jailed in a government crackdown.
– ‘McCarthyist climate’ –
Hundreds have also been sentenced to death in speedy mass trials and dozens of youth activists who spearheaded the 2011 uprising have been handed jail terms, with the authorities being accused of using the judiciary as a blunt tool of repression.
“Many judges believe the state was threatened” during Morsi’s single year of rule, said Hassan Nafaa, a political professor at Cairo University. “They are taking their revenge today with harsh and unjustified verdicts.”
Middle East expert Karim Bittar told AFP the “rulings confirm that Egypt is living in a purely McCarthyist climate”.
In Egypt, however, the Al-Jazeera rulings drew limited criticism, with newspapers on Tuesday speaking of verdicts against “terrorists” accused of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad”.
The few voices denouncing the court’s decision were to be found on social media networks.
“Seven-10 years in jail for journalists. Mubarak got 3 years for 30 years of corruption,” a well-known blogger known as The Big Pharaoh said on Twitter
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