A Moroccan court rejected on Wednesday, August 27, a request to release on bail activist Ibtissame Lachgar, who faces trial over “offending Islam,” despite concerns about her health, a defense lawyer said. Lachgar, a 50-year-old clinical psychologist, was arrested earlier this month after posting online in late July a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt with the word “Allah” in Arabic followed by “is lesbian.”
Appearing on Wednesday before a judge for the first time, Lachgar seemed tired, wearing a medical brace on her left arm and smiling as she greeted supporters before the proceedings began at the courtroom in the capital Rabat, AFP agency reported. “She is being treated for cancer and is due to undergo critical surgery on her left arm in September,” said Lachgar’s lawyer Naima El Guellaf, who added her client’s doctors have “warned of amputation if the surgery is not carried out.” Mohamed Khattab, another lawyer in her defense team, also said his client’s health was “critical.”
The defense team said they provided the court with medical documents and guaranteed that Lachgar would “not run away from trial,” but the court rejected the request, Guellaf said. A similar request was rejected last week. The trial was adjourned until September 3 after two more lawyers joined the defense team. Guellaf said her client was being kept in isolation and was “forbidden from speaking to other inmates.”
Lachgar’s social media post drew sharp backlash, with many calling for her arrest under a provision of the penal code that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison for “anyone who offends the Islamic religion.” That sentence can be raised to five years if the offence is committed in public, “including by electronic means.”
In 2009, Lachgar founded the Alternative Movement for Individual Liberties (MALI), known for holding a picnic during Ramadan that year to challenge a law criminalising breaking the fast in public without a valid religious reason. MALI has led several other campaigns protesting violence against women and child sexual abuse. Lachgar has had previous run-ins with the authorities, having been arrested in 2016 for disturbing public order and in 2018 amid a campaign in support of abortion rights, though she was not prosecuted in those cases.
