Before formal charges were raised against him, Ibrahim told the Cairo Times that unlike 1995, when the monitoring committee was a coalition of various human rights groups, this year's committee would be formed solely of volunteers, mostly taken from the ranks of Ibrahim's sociology students at the American University in Cairo. The period in which I was detained was going to be used to meet volunteers and train them. As a result, the committee only has 50 members at the present time, as opposed to 600 in the last elections. Ibrahim stressed that the activities of this year's committee would be supported solely by donations from its members, and that all members were Egyptians, although he didn't expect that to carry much weight with his many critics in the Egyptian press. And the Egyptian press did not disappoint Ibrahim.
Democracy has to have teeth.
This new campaign is a clear threat to renew my detention. Ibrahim's expectations proved to be uncannily on the mark. Although he hurriedly issued a statement defending himself against the charges that appeared in the press, the government, with equal speed, summoned him to answer the same charges only one day before the first meeting of the monitoring committee was expected to take place. Ibrahim was wary of hazarding a guess as to what might happen next, or when and if the case against him will go to court. The developments follow no logic that I know of.