The Emad Shahin Death Sentence

Emad Shahin

 Over the weekend Egypt indulged in another round of multiple death sentences, including some 106 people in a so-called prison break case and 16 people in an alleged espionage case. The former group includes ousted President Muhammad Morsi, and convicts him in a case dating from before his election to the Presidency.

The second case is particularly outraging the scholarly community, as it includes a death sentence against Professor Emad Shahin, one of Egypt's most respected political scientists, normally based at AUC.

Fortunately, the sentence against Shahin is in absentia, as he is currently here in Washington at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. A respected authority on political Islam and the Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics.

Though some Egyptian media accuse him of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, studying a subject is not the same as supporting it.  The court apparently accepted the charges without investigating the evidence; as Professor Shahin notes in a statement on his website, " two defendants sentenced to death today had already been dead and one has been in prison for the past 19 years."

He has also given an interview with Al Jazeera about the case.