An Egyptian judge on Friday overturned an acquittal verdict of two “debauched” young women who were jailed last year for posting “indecent” videos of themselves laughing, smiling and belly dancing on the social media video app TikTok.
He ordered their pretrial detention for 15 days over fresh charges of “human trafficking,” a judicial source told the Associated Press.
A Cairo court has accused 20-year-old student Haneen Hossam and 22-year-old Mawada Eladhm of recruiting young women for “indecent jobs that violate the principles and values” of Muslim-majority Egyptian society, the judicial official said.
The motion came just two days after an appeals court had acquitted the two belly dancers and ordered their release.
As Breitbart News reported, last summer the pair were sentenced to two years in prison for posting “indecent” dance videos on TikTok in a fraught case that critics describe as a further crackdown on self-expression in the conservative society.
The women were also fined 300,000 Egyptian pounds (nearly $19,000) each for “violating the values and principles of the Egyptian family,” inciting debauchery and promoting human trafficking, according to a statement from the public prosecutor.
Their case drew the ire of Egyptian feminists who dismissed the prosecution of Hossam and Adham as another example of their conservative society’s encroachment on women’s freedoms.
At the time, women’s rights advocates circulated an online petition describing the arrests as a “systematic crackdown that targets low-income women.”
This is not the first time Egypt has pursued women entertainers for posting online content considered immoral by state-sanctioned Islamic authorities.
A similar case in 2016 also involved Egyptian courts sentencing two female belly dancers to six months in prison, also for “inciting debauchery,” which prosecutors said damaged the image of Egyptian women and affected public morality.
Egyptian belly dancer Sama al-Masry was sentenced to three years in prison last year for “inciting debauchery” on social media after she posted a dance video to TikTok.
That sentence followed another Islamic nation, Pakistan, that issued TikTok a “final” warning after complaining its leaders have not done enough to moderate “obscene” content showing Muslim women dancing, laughing, smiling and enjoying belly dancing.
TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
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