Members of the European Parliament expressed deep concern Thursday about the state of justice in Egypt, in particular the long jail terms handed down June 23 to three All Jazeera journalists and 11 other defendants who were tried in absentia.
The court in June sentenced two Al Jazeera journalists to seven years in jail and one to 10 years in jail.
The three were accused of aiding a terrorist organization -- the Muslim Brotherhood, the party of Mohamed Morsi, who was ousted in a military coup in June 2013. The journalist who received the longest sentence was accused also of possessing ammunition -- a spent shell casing he had found on the ground during a protest.
Al Jazeera has maintained the three were just doing their jobs as journalists.
The members of the European Parliament said they were also concerned by the confirmation of death sentences against 183 people.
The president of Egypt "should act without delay ... to ensure that no death sentence is executed and that no one can be detained in Egypt without a verdict issued in a court procedure," the parliament said.
The parliamentarians, meeting in Strasbourg, France, went on to say, in a resolution, that they regretted "the existence of media and web censorship," the worsening of violence against women and the criminalising of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for expressing their sexual orientation and right of assembly.
The parliament said EU member states should have "a common strategy towards Egypt. They called as well for an EU-wide ban on the export to Egypt of "intrusion and surveillance technologies which could be used to spy on and repress citizens."
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