1951

*Mohamed Morsi, the fifth president of Egypt was born (August 20).

Mohamed Morsi (Arabic: محمد محمد مرسى عيسى العياط‎, ALA-LC: Muḥammad Muḥammad Mursī ‘Īsá al-‘Ayyāṭ) (b. August 20, 1951) is an Egyptian politician who served as the fifth president of Egypt, from June 30, 2012 to July 3, 2013, when he was removed by the military after mass protests. He is considered by most to be the first democratically elected head of state in Egyptian history. Although his predecessors also held elections, these were generally marred by irregularities and allegations of rigging. He was also the first president to have first assumed his duty after an election, as opposed to coming to power as revolutionaries (in the case of Gamal Abdel Nasser) or as appointed successors (Sadat, Mubarak).

Mohamed Morsi was educated in Egyptian public schools and universities. He was later granted a scholarship from the Egyptian government to prepare for a Ph.D. degree in the United States. Morsi was a Member of Parliament in the People's Assembly of Egypt from 2000 to 2005, and a leading member in the Muslim Brotherhood. He became Chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) when it was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. He stood as the FJP's candidate for the May–June 2012 presidential election.

Morsi's victory in the presidential election was announced on June 24, 2012 after he won the run-off election winning 51.7 percent of the vote against Ahmed Shafik, deposed leader Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister.

As president, Morsi granted himself unlimited powers on the pretext that he would "protect" the nation from the Mubarak-era power structure, which he called "remnants of the old regime" (Arabic: فلول‎, ALA-LC: Foloul), and the power to legislate without judicial oversight or review of his acts. In late November, he issued an Islamist-backed draft constitution and called for a referendum, an act that his opponents called an "Islamist coup"." These issues, along with complaints of prosecutions of journalists and attacks on nonviolent demonstrators, brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets in the2012 Egyptian protests.

On June 30, 2013, mass protests erupted across Egypt which saw millions of protesters calling for the president's resignation. In response to the events, Morsi was given a 48 hour ultimatum by the military to meet the people's demands and to solve political differences or else they would intervene by implementing their own road map for the country and made it clear that they were not planning a coup.

Morsi was declared unseated on July 3, 2013 by a council consisting of defense minister Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, opposition leader Mohamed El Baradei, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar Ahmed el-Tayeb, and Coptic Pope Tawadros II. The military suspended the constitution, and established a new administration headed by the chief justice, and initiated a "brutal" crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

On September 1, 2013, prosecutors referred Morsi to trial on charges of inciting deadly violence. The date was set for November 4, 2013 and he was being tried on charges of incitement of murder and violence.

*****

Seif, Ahmed
Ahmed Seif , also written as Ahmad Saif (el-Islam Hamad Abd el-Fattah) (January 9, 1951 - August 27, 2014), was an Egyptian journalist and human rights lawyer.

In the 1980s, Seif served a five-year prison sentence for activism. Afterwards, he was still several times imprisoned for political reasons, including during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law. In 2011, he was also leader of the political movement Kefaya. 

Seif was the father of two prominent activists during the Egyptian Revolution, Mona Seif and Alaa Abd El Fattah.  Seif married to Laila Soueif, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cairo. 

Because of Seif's involvement in the socialist movement, he was arrested in 1983 and tortured by agents of the Egyptian security forces. For five years, he was in prison. After his release, Seif focused on the fight against torture in Egypt.  In 1989, shortly after his release, he took on one of the most important human rights issues in the country itself.  Because of his struggle against torture and injustice he grew over the years into a central figure in several successful Egyptian human rights cases. 

In 1999, he was one of the founders of the Centre Hisham Mubarak for Law in Cairo, a center named for Hisham Mubarak, a lawyer who had focused on human rights and the granting of legal assistance to victims of violations of human rights laws. 

Seif was one of the attorneys in the case against fifteen defendants after the bombing in Taba and other places in the Sinai in October 2004.  Seif argued strongly against the wave of bombings while. on the other hand, arguing that the defendants in no way tortured of engaged in violations of human rights. Nevertheless, all fifteen defendants were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained during their torture.  

Other high-profile cases with other lawyers were the Queen Boat case in 2001, in which 52 men were tried on the basis of their sexual orientation, and the defense of 49 textile workers because they had participated in protests on April 6, 2008 in Mahalla.

In 2006, Seif took on the defense of Karim Amer, the first blogger who was indicted for a crime because of his criticism, on the Internet, of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Islam.  Amer was sentenced to four years imprisonment. 

Seif died on August 27, 2014 at the age of 63 during open-heart surgery.