“Maikel is the first prisoner of conscience in Egypt after the revolution,” Adel Ramadan, one of his lawyers, said in a telephone interview. “This ruling is a warning to all journalists, bloggers and human rights activists in Egypt that the punishment for criticizing the army is a sentence in a military prison.”…

“It’s pretty stunning in Egypt’s supposed new era of rights to see the military government prosecuting someone in a military court for writing about the military,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said last week. “This trial sets a dangerous precedent at a time when Egypt is trying to transition away from the abuses of the Mubarak era.”