US State Dept features Sanaa Seif in campaign for women prisoners

Activist Sanaa Seif is among 20 women featured in the US State Department’s new campaign calling for the release of female political prisoners.

Seif was arrested on June 21, 2014 in a peaceful march outside the Ettehadiya Presidential Palace that protested her brother Alaa Abd El Fattah’s imprisonment.

The Free the 20 campaign was announced during a Tuesday press conference by Samantha Power, the US permanent representative to the United Nations. Power said that one woman imprisoned on political charges would be featured on the state department website and social media for each of the 20 days leading up to a high-level United Nations conference on women’s rights.

“We are sending a simple message to their governments and others like them: if you want to empower women, stop imprisoning them,” the campaign’s website declares as part of its mission statement.

Seif and 23 fellow protesters were initially sentenced to three years in prison in October, 2014. The sentence was later changed to two years in prison, with two years monitored probation, after the case went to an appeals court in December 2014. 

The charges included partaking in an unauthorized protest, violating the protest law, instigating unrest, the destruction of public and private property, the possession of weapons and explosives, resisting authorities and assaulting security forces.

Lawyer Yasmine Hossam Eddin told Mada Masr in a previous interview that the charges lacked evidence, especially the charges of violence. Breaking the protest law alone is not enough to legally lead to prison time, she said.

Seif and her brother went on hunger strike against their imprisonment from September 4 to November 19, 2014.