The UBC Graduate School of Journalism is shocked and disappointed at the sentencing of Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, along with two other Al Jazeera journalists, by a court in Egypt.
An Egyptian judge sentenced the three men to three years in prison on Saturday August 29.
Fahmy has accepted a position as an adjunct professor at the journalism school in Vancouver for an academic term. He will be Global Reporting Journalist in Residence at the school, as well as a W. Maurice Young Centre Visiting Fellow in Applied Ethics.
“This is a deplorable decision,” said Alfred Hermida, director of the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. “Mohamed Fahmy and his colleagues were simply doing their job as journalists. Journalism is not a crime.”
Hermida was a correspondent for the BBC in North Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s, during which time he was expelled from Tunisia for his human rights reporting.
According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 18 journalists were being held in Egyptian prisons as of June 2015, the majority of which were accused of being affiliated with the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
Long-running trial
Fahmy, Australian Peter Greste and Egyptian Baher Mohamed were working for Al Jazeera English when they were arrested in Cairo on December 29, 2013 on terrorism-related charges, which have been widely denounced.
The three were held in prison for more than a year before an appeal resulted in a retrial.
Greste was deported from Egypt on February 2, 2015, while Fahmy and Mohamed were out on bail since the first day of their retrial, February 12, 2015. The verdict in the retrial had been postponed twice over the summer.
Fahmy and Mohamed were taken into custody after the sentencing. Greste was convicted in absentia. Mohamed was given an additional six-month jail sentence.
Role at UBC
When Fahmy takes up his position at UBC, he will be invited to serve as guest lecturer in classes offered by the journalism school and elsewhere at the university. He will also assist UBC Journalism associate professor Peter Klein in developing his proposed Global Reporting Centre.
Fahmy will also offer a campus-wide lunchtime lecture about his experiences, as part of the Centre for Applied Ethics series, Dialogues on Accountability in Ethically Responsible Institutions.
This position is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Journalism, the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics and by Peter Klein.
After studying business at City University in Vancouver, Fahmy started working as an interpreter in the Middle East, and went on to work as a journalist at news organizations including CNN, Los Angeles Times and Dubai TV.
In 2013 he became Al Jazeera English’s bureau chief in Egypt. He was awarded the Tom Renner Investigative Journalism Award for the CNN documentary “Death in the Desert.” He is also the recipient of the World Press Freedom Award from UNESCO, and was awarded the Royal Television Society Award in absentia.
Fahmy wrote the book, Baghdad Bound: An Interpreter’s Chronicles of the Iraq War, and is currently working on a book about his experiences in Egypt.
