One of Egypt’s ‘TikTok Girls’ has begun an appeal against her 10-year jail sentence for human-trafficking charges.

Haneen Hossam, 22, and her pal Mowada al-Adham, 23, were jailed for using TikTok to show girls how to make money from the social media platform.

Now her appeal is being heard at the Cairo Criminal Court in the Egyptian capital.

The prosecution case has been decried as without merit by Hossam’s lawyer after Hossam was targeted by authorities following a conservative purge against influencers making money from online postings.

The Egyptian authorities alleged that the Cairo University student had trafficked young women under the age of 18 by encouraging them to post videos on an online platform in exchange for money.

She had previously been charged, convicted and sentenced by a court for “violating family values”, but this charge was overturned early last year.

But she was then accused of human trafficking and convicted in June 2021.

The next hearing, reportedly set for Monday, 18th April, will decide her future.

Hossam, who is also active on the video-sharing, social media platform TikTok, where she reportedly had approximately 900,000 followers, was first arrested in April 2020, after she invited her female followers to join a separate video-sharing platform called Likee.

She reportedly told them that they could make money by posting videos on it.

This led to her being charged with “violating family values and principles” by Egyptian prosecutors.

And despite the first sentence being quashed, her legal troubles have by no means come to a stop.

This is despite 15 different human right organisations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), all reportedly calling on the Egyptian authorities to stop putting TikTok and Likee content creators on trial and to guarantee their freedom of expression.

The English-language newspaper the Middle East Observer and other media outlets have claimed that Hossam’s case and the cases of other content creators were marred by numerous violations on behalf of the authorities, who they claim treated the defendants as guilty before their trials and without any evidence.

The Finnish ambassador to the United States, Kirsti Kauppi, 65, told the 46th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in March 2021 that she and other countries remained “deeply concerned about the trajectory of human rights in Egypt”.