Fahmy joined Tom Mulcair during a brief news conference in Toronto on Tuesday, where he thanked the NDP Leader for “directly questioning Mr. Harper in Parliament about the mild stance toward my case”.
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His arrival ends a near two-year ordeal that raised questions about Egypt’s commitment to free speech and whether Canada’s Conservative government did enough to help him.
“If you ever doubt that these campaigns make a difference, I’m living proof that they do”, he said. He was released after spending roughly a year in jail, only to be sentenced to three more years behind bars in August 2015 following a retrial.
“You have to care when you hear that there’re governments out there who think a person who’s trying to communicate information to the public is a criminal and a terrorist”, said Badri Murali, a fourth-year journalism student.
“There are no words to describe how it feels when you are wrongly convicted and sitting in a cold cell, infested with insects, nurturing a broken shoulder”, he told reporters. He said the former foreign affairs minister, John Baird, damaged his case when he said during a press conference in Egypt that Canada would not prosecute Fahmy should he be turned over to Canada, something Fahmy called a diplomatic faux pas.
“But when you’re there your only hope is that your prime minister will do everything in his power to get you out of there.”
Fahmy, a naturalized Canadian who gave up his Egyptian citizenship during his imprisonment, said he felt “betrayed and abandoned” by Harper, who he said dispatched envoys who lacked the clout to influence Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
The case was widely condemned by rights groups and others.
Today, Fahmy tweeted a joyous message to his followers over Twitter.
Fahmy, along with two colleagues who also worked for the news network, was arrested by Egyptian authorities in 2013 for supposedly biased reporting.
Fahmy received a pardon in September. Fahmy accepted a teaching position from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, but it’s not clear when he will begin that new job. “Canada is the best place to do that”.
He and his supporters have also created the Fahmy Foundation for Free Press to advocate for other journalists who’ve been jailed around the world. It is now campaigning on behalf of seven journalists, a few of whom have been imprisoned for more than four years.
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Mr. Fahmy’s wife, Marwa Omara, said she was looking forward to finally “having a normal life”.
