There can be renewed hope that Mohamed Fahmy will be joining UBC as a journalist-in-residence at the School of Journalism, as Egyptian President Adbel Fattah el-Sisi has pardoned Fahmy after the journalist's second trial led to a controversial ruling last month that Fahmy was guilty of terrorism.
Fahmy is a Canadian journalist and author who has spent much of his career reporting on unrest in the Middle East. After reporting for CNN, he became the Egyptian bureau chief of news network Al-Jazeera English.
In 2011, Fahmy was arrested on charges of terrorism in connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, a controversial political association in Egypt that had recently been classified as a terrorist group by the Egyptian government.
“The accusations are conspiring and being member of the Muslim Brotherhood, fabricating news to falsely portray Egypt in a state of civil war and to serve the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood and operating without proper equipment licences,” Fahmy told The Ubyssey in an interview back in July.
Fahmy was initially sentenced to seven years in an Egyptian prison in the first trial. During his second trial, at the end of which he was sentenced to three years, outgoing Director of UBC’s School of Journalism and Director of the Global Reporting Centre Peter Klein cobbled the funds together to offer Fahmy a position as journalist-in-residence at the school.
Now that he has been pardoned, Fahmy will be spending one semester at the UBC J-School as the W. Maurice Young Centre Visiting Fellow to Applied Ethics and the Jouranlist-in-Residence at the Global Reporting Centre.