The trial of Egyptian human rights researcher and graduate student Patrick George Zaki will resume on Tuesday before an emergency state security misdemeanour court, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said in a statement.
Zaki, an Egyptian-Italian graduate student at the University of Bologna, was arrested in February 2020 during a visit to Egypt and accused of "spreading false information" over an article he wrote about the plight of Egyptian Christians.
Zaki, who also worked for EIPR, had been held in pre-trial detention for over a year and a half before his trial kicked off in September 2021.
"Patrick faces the possibility of a five-year prison sentence for nothing other than exercising his legitimate [right to] freedom of expression in an article titled, "Displacement, Killing and Harassment: A Week's Journal of Egypt's Copts"….published in July 2019 on the 'Daraj' website," the statement read.
"In [the article in question], he presented some details of a week in his life as an Egyptian Coptic Christian receiving news [on] the conditions of Copts. In September 2021, after Patrick was remanded in custody for 19 months, the supreme state security prosecution referred the case against him to the emergency court," the statement added.
The EIPR's lawyers have insisted repeatedly throughout the different litigation stages that "all the charges against Zaki had been invalid."
Egypt's human rights record is regularly condemned under the regime of president Abel-Fattah al-Sisi, with local and international rights groups saying there are currently about 60,000 political prisoners behind bars over charges similar to Zaki's.