The delays are growing shorter. The latest delay in photographer Mahmoud Abu Zeid’s journey through Egypt’s justice system was announced today: four days. The start of his trial has once again been re-scheduled, this time from today to May 21. This is the sixth delay since the end of 2015.

Egypt has been much in the news lately, so a delay in one case of injustice may not attract the attention it deserves. It was confirmed today that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will be in Cairo tomorrow for talks with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It also comes after two courts sentenced 152 people to between two and five years in prison on Sunday for participating in peaceful protests last month. They were not convicted of vague charges like “inciting violence,” though that was in the mix; they were all found guilty of protesting, something that has been illegal in Egypt since 2013.

That news has taken much of the attention away from the story of one photographer, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known professionally as Shawkan. But it may predict some possible outcomes for Shawkan, none of them happy. President al-Sisi’s government is willing to find people guilty of peaceful protest, and it now has the apparatus in place to handle large numbers of defendants, which is what a government confronts its justice system with when it makes mass arrests at protests a standard practice, a policy. Both circumstances will come to bear on Shawkan’s story and it may be why this latest delay is for only four days.

Shawkan was arrested more than 1000 days ago while covering a protest that was not peaceful, that was a part of the vast demonstrations that one could say were a part of the ongoing Arab Spring movement. He is one of more than 700 co-defendants awaiting the start of his trial.
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