Egypt disputed Sunday a claim by British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney that she had been warned she risked arrest last year if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary. Clooney, a rights lawyer who married Hollywood star George Clooney in a lavish Venice ceremony last year, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that the warning had stopped her going ahead with a Cairo launch for the February 2014 report for the International Bar Association.
But interior ministry spokesman Hani Abdel Latif questioned the source of the alleged warning. “She should say exactly who said that,” Abdel Latif told AFP. “Why not specify from the start who told her that?”
“We have nothing against her,” he said.
In the comments published by the Guardian on Saturday, Clooney did not detail the source of the alleged warning.
“When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo,” she said. “They said: ‘Does the report criticise the army, the judiciary, or the government?’ We said: ‘Well, yes.’ They said: ‘Well then, you’re risking arrest.'”
The report, based on a fact-finding mission made in mid-2013, warned about the wide powers that ministers had over judges and highlighted a record of selective prosecutions, flaws that Clooney said later contributed to the convictions of three Al-Jazeera journalists… see more
source: yahoo news
Tags: Amal Arrest Claim, Egypt Dispute, Politics
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