A man has been sentenced to prison to spend three years under hard conditions for making a comment that ordinarily shouldn't send anyone behind bars.
Taymour el-Sobki, an Egyptian blogger has been sentenced to three years in jail with hard labour for claiming on national television that 30 per cent of wives would cheat on their husbands if they had the chance.
Sentenced under a 'spreading false news' charge, the court in Egypt said Taymour el-Sobki's comments would harm public peace and damage the public interest.
El-Sobki faced a backlash from other TV talk show hosts and civilians who filed complaints to public prosecutors accusing him of insulting Egyptian women.
Public prosecutors, who have the right to vet such complaints and to choose which ones to pursue, charged el-Sobki and took him to court on these grounds.
El-Sobki had stated: 'Many women cheat on their husbands. I can say that 30 percent of women are ready to be deviant'.
In particular, he claimed, women in the southern cities of 'Asyut, Minya, Sohag, Qena, Luxor and Aswan'.
El-Sobki, whose Facebook page called 'Diaries of a Suffering Husband' has more than one million followers, added: 'Many women are involved in extramarital affairs while their husbands are abroad.'
His comments included the suggestion that arranged marriages in traditional southern Egypt exacerbated the problem of infidelity because women ended up with men they didn't know.
After the claim a masked man from the region appeared in a video carried on YouTube armed with an assault rifle, and issued a death threat against El-Sobki.
However, the court's decision has been condemned by human rights groups.
'We can criticize or reject the comments he made, but he did not commit a crime,' said prominent rights lawyer Gamal Eid.
Under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, authorities have waged crackdowns against Islamists, then left-wing activists and finally against broader dissent. But lately, many activists say harassment and threats have broadened even to people with no connection to politics or activism.
Artists, writers, and intellectuals have expressed fear over the future of free speech and creativity in Egypt following a two-year sentence handed by an appeals court last month against author Ahmed Naji for violating 'public modesty' through publishing an excerpt of his novel containing a sex scene in an Egyptian literary magazine.
Naji's detention in a Cairo prison following the sentencing hit Egypt's artistic and intellectual community hard as it followed recent sentences handed to the TV presenter and researcher Islam Behery, who is serving a year-long prison sentence for 'defaming religious symbols' and the writer Fatma Naoot, who has appealed a three-year sentence for defaming Islam.
Eid said el-Sobki's case has similar attributes with the expulsion from parliament of Tawfiq Okasha earlier this month as a response to him meeting Israel's ambassador to Egypt.
'The two issues seem to be unrelated, but they both share the same attribute... Okasha did not break the law,' said Eid. 'The two incidents were handled outside the realm of the law.'
The cases, Eid said, are an example of how 'it is not the law, but it is pressure and public opinion, and rallying around someone, that acquits or incriminates him.'
'Unfortunately these are not isolated cases,' said Eid. 'They come in the context of that the state itself violates the law day and night, and implements it haphazardly.'
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