Fahmy says wedding, daily life on hold without passport

Canadian acting bureau chief of Al-Jazeera English, Mohamed Fahmy, left, leaves a court with his fiance Marwa Omara after a hearing in his retrial near Tora prison in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, March 8, 2015. (AP / Hassan Ammar)

A Canadian journalist awaiting his terror trial in Egypt says he can’t get married or go about his daily life until the Canadian government re-issues his passport, which Ottawa has refused to do until his case is decided.

Mohamed Fahmy, who is a Canadian citizen, says the federal government is dragging its heels after an Egyptian judge gave him the go-ahead to get a new passport.

“I do not understand why Canada is not giving me that document,” Fahmy told CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday.

Fahmy says he’s on a no-fly list at Egypt’s airports, so holding a Canadian passport would not make him a flight risk. However, he needs the passport to rent a hotel or a car, to identify himself in the tightly-policed country and to get married to his long-time fiancée, Marwa Omara.

“I’ve been trying to get married for months,” he said.

He says his lack of a passport has become a “major problem,” and he’s shocked that Canada is withholding the document. “What’s the holdup?” he asked.

The Canadian government sent Fahmy a letter on Wednesday telling him that it will re-issue his passport when Egypt lifts its travel restrictions on him.

“The Passport Program will provide you with a travel document as soon as the court signals definitively that one is required, that your existing passport is, in fact, missing, and that the court-imposed travel restrictions against you are lifted,” the letter said.

An Egyptian court gave Mohamed Fahmy the go-ahead earlier this week to report his old Canadian passport stolen, and to obtain a new one from the Canadian government.

Now Fahmy says he’s paying a “hefty price” for his country’s refusal to take action. “This is a major problem for me,” he said.

Fahmy says he recently spent 25 minutes with Egyptian police at a checkpoint while they struggled to confirm his identity. At the time, he had only a letter from the Canadian Embassy to identify himself as a Canadian citizen.

Fahmy spent more than a year in a Cairo prison on terror charges laid against him while he was in the country working for Al Jazeera English. He was convicted along with Australian journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian Mohamed Bader in a widely-criticized trial last year. Greste was deported to Australia last February. Fahmy and Bader later won an appeal for a retrial set for later this spring.

The Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised Fahmy surrendered his Egyptian citizenship while behind bars after he was told that doing so would speed his release. He is now a citizen of Canada only.

With files from the Canadian Press