Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the note from the Department of Foreign Affairs and thank it for the work it has done. It is good to hear that the Minister for Foreign Affairs has met his Egyptian counterpart. I am very disturbed to read the detail of the report from the Department.

It suggested that joining a protest in a mosque, a place of religious worship, was deemed a crime in Egypt. I suppose the big concern we all have relates to the idea of a mass trial of defendants. I do not think there is a belief among the Irish population that this type of mass trial leads to a just outcome. I do not see any reference in the report to the fact that Ibrahim Halawa was charged as an adult, even though he was 17 years old when he was arrested. We need to keep reiterating the important point that he was put into the adult system, even though he was a minor. It is important that we continue to call on the Taoiseach to talk to his counterpart, President el-Sisi, to outline at the highest level the importance of this case to the Irish people.

We have been told that the Egyptian authorities have changed the charges. Have the new charges been clarified? Do we have any idea of the possible sentences that are associated with these new charges? We know that when the previous charges were in place, people were talking in terms of the death penalty and so on. It has been suggested that there has been a reduction in the charges, but it would be helpful if we could get some sort of sense of them. I welcome the fact this committee is continuing to monitor the situation. I would like to think we will discuss the case again after the date of the next legal proceedings.