CAIRO: Egyptian activist Ahmed Douma, a leading figure in the country’s 2011 uprising who has spent the last decade behind bars, has been released following a presidential pardon, lawyers said on Saturday.

“President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi... has used his constitutional powers” to pardon several prisoners including Douma, said lawyer Tarek Elawady, a member of the presidential pardons committee.

Prominent rights lawyer Khaled Ali and other activists later posted a picture of Douma leaving Badr prison on Cairo’s outskirts — a facility that has been repeatedly criticised for poor conditions.

Douma was originally sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for clashing with security forces but that was cut to 15 years in 2019. Later that year, Egypt’s top appeals court upheld the reduced sentence, as well as a fine of six million Egyptian pounds ($372,000 at the time).

Douma, now 37, was a leading activist in the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak. In 2021, he published a collection of poems entitled “Curly”, written while he was held in solitary confinement. The collection was displayed at that year’s Cairo International Book Fair but was quickly pulled for “security reasons”.

In one of his poems from prison, Douma writes: “There’s no time for depression, no opportunity for sadness, the flood is raging.” He was arrested in the sweeping crackdown that followed the army’s 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist elected after the uprising. Pro-democracy campaigners as well as Islamists were detained in mass arrests that drew international condemnation.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2023