Eight Egyptian men have been sentenced to three years in prison after a court in Cairo charged them with debauchery and offending public morality for a video that appears to show a same-sex wedding. The men were arrested on September 6, according to Human Rights Watch.
The video, filmed in August on a Nile riverboat and uploaded to YouTube, shows two men kissing and exchanging rings with a group of male onlookers. Yet the defendants in the case claim the video is of a birthday party.
Homosexuality is legal in Egypt — which is why the men were brought up on decency charges — yet the BBC points out police raids of gay establishments have risen in recent months.
Egyptian authorities have also allegedly taken to social media recently to arrest gay men, according to a report in Germany’s largest paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and a report in The Washington Post on the use of gay dating app Grindr in Egypt.









