CAIRO, Egypt
Ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's son has decried a court verdict in Cairo that called for imposing the death penalty on his father on alleged jailbreak charges.
"The verdict is invalid and we don't pay attention to it," Osama Morsi told Anadolu Agency via telephone Saturday.
"The president remains steadfast and will continue to defend the people’s will until the revolution prevails," he said.
Amnesty International also criticized the court’s death penalty, calling it “grossly unfair trials.”
In a statement released Saturday, the top human rights body said: “An Egyptian court’s recommendation today to sentence ousted President Mohamed Morsi and more than 100 other defendants to death after grossly unfair trials shows the deplorable state of the country’s criminal justice system.”
Said Boumedouha, Amnesty’s deputy director of Middle East and North Africa program, defined the court verdict as “complete disregard for human rights."
“His trials were undermined even before he set foot in the courtroom. The fact that he was held for months incommunicado without judicial oversight and that he didn’t have a lawyer to represent him during the investigations makes these trials nothing but a charade based on null and void procedures.”
An Egyptian court Saturday referred 122 out of 166 defendants, including Morsi to the country's grand mufti to consider possible death sentences against them over charges of jailbreak and espionage charges.
Morsi's family did not attend Saturday's trial session, citing "their rejection of the legitimacy of the trial."
The opinion of the mufti was not binding on the court, but Egyptian law had made it necessary for judges to seek a religious point of view on any death sentence.
Egyptian authorities accuse Morsi and 130 others of taking part in a mass jailbreak during Egypt's January 2011 uprising that ousted the then President, Hosni Mubarak.
They also accused Morsi and 35 co-defendants of "conspiring" with the Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah to carry out "terrorist acts" inside Egypt.
