The Egyptian activist Abdul Rahman Qardawi. Screenshot from his video shot in front of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
Egyptian activist Abdul Rahman Qardawi was kept in detention on Thursday afternoon by the Advocate General of the Court of Cassation, Myrna Kallas, based on a request by the UAE’s Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Upon his return from Syria on Dec. 28, Qaradawi was arrested at the Masnaa border crossing by General Security based on an arrest warrant issued by the Council of Arab Interior Ministers after the Egyptian judiciary convicted him in 2017 for “inciting to violence and disseminating false information.”
Qaradawi is a critic of the Egyptian government, which overthrew former resident Mohammad Morsi, who hailed from the Muslim Brotherhood, in 2013. He is the son of Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was sentenced in absentia by the Egyptian courts, and who died in Qatar in 2022.
Based on an extradition request made on Monday by the UAE against Qaradawi for his hostile positions towards Abu Dhabi and his alleged incitement to unrest there, Judge Kallas ordered to keep him in detention. For the time being, the judge has not examined the crimes Egypt accused him of, since Cairo’s request for extradition was made yesterday. A source close to the case told L’Orient-Le Jour that the Egyptian file should be studied on Friday.
Speaking to L’Orient-Le Jour, Qaradawi’s lawyer, Mohammad Sablouh, said that there is no extradition agreement between the UAE and Lebanon. A judicial source familiar with the case said that the UAE authorities have, however, invoked the principle of reciprocity to justify their extradition request. In the absence of a formal agreement, this principle would allow the two states to hand over each other’s wanted persons, said this source.
Sablouh said that, in any case, the extradition should not take place, especially as his client is not a UAE national, and the crimes for which he is being prosecuted “are not punishable in Lebanon, where freedom of expression is enshrined.”
‘Arab Zionists’
The activist had traveled to Syria from Turkey, where he is also a citizen, after landing in Beirut. He had crossed the border to Damascus unhindered. But during his stay in the Syrian capital, he broadcast a video, while on the esplanade of the Umayyad Mosque, celebrating “the victory of the Syrian revolution against the tyrant Bashar al-Assad,” advocating “future victories in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.”
“We pray to God to enable the Syrian people and the new Syrian leadership to confront all the evil challenges posed by the plotters, notably the Zionist Arab regimes,” he said in his video, pointing to “the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”
L’Orient-Le Jour learned that Qaradawi said during his interrogation that the attacks that targeted him on social media pushed him to immediately delete his video before returning to Lebanon.
While Sablouh confirmed that there are extradition agreements between Lebanon and Egypt, he added that they do not apply to crimes with political character, or when the perpetrators of such crimes risk being tortured in the requesting country. In any case, the crimes attributed to Qaradawi date back to 2017 and are now time-barred under the five-year statute of limitations.
Will the Egyptian government critic be extradited? If so, to which of the two requesting countries? This question is all the more complex as it involves political and legal considerations, and could have an impact on Lebanon’s relations with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Speaking to L’Orient-Le Jour, a judge said that it was not the Lebanese judiciary, but rather the cabinet that would have to decide on the extradition requests, after receiving a report with legal recommendations from Lebanon’s top prosecutor Jamal Hajjar.
This article was originally published in French in L’Orient-Le Jour. It was translated by Joelle El-Khoury.
