Youssef Moustafa Ali Nada (Arabic: يوسف مصطفى علي ندا; 17 May 1931 – 22 December 2024) was an Egyptian businessman and Muslim Brotherhood financial strategist.
Nada is most famous for raising successful European human rights legal cases to defend himself against accusations of terrorism by the United States.
[1] The U.S. accusation was made applicable under the UN terror-listing program and affected his life in Switzerland, notably his assets, reputation, honor, and ability to move freely.
Between 2007 and 2009, Nada's ordeal featured heavily in a report by Swiss Senator and former Prosecutor Dick Marty on behalf of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Marty's report assessed the UN's terror-blacklisting procedures against international rule of law standards – along with those for a similar blacklist run by the European Union – and concluded that both were "completely arbitrary" and violated human rights.
He became victim of a United Arab Emirates funded smear campaign by a Geneva-based private intelligence firm named Alp Services of Mario Brero, exposed in a March 2023 article in the New Yorker.
[16] A 1986 article in London-based Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Nada, along with Ahmed Ben Bella, a former president of Algeria, held a secret meeting at his Switzerland home attended by "major figures in some of the world’s most violent groups."
Other attendees of the meeting included the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman and Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a leading Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim scholar.
In an interview on al-Jazeera,[17] Nada himself vehemently denied any such thing to have occurred [18] citing that well-known hatred between the individuals made such a meeting implausible.
The names he focuses on are Sylvain Besson, Guido Olimpio, Richard Labaviere, Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikof and Victor Comras, Lorenzo Vidino all journalists who have pushed defamatory allegations against Nada and which were found baseless by all the authorities who investigated them.
"[28] In April 2008, an Egyptian military tribunal sentenced Nada in absentia to ten years' imprisonment for providing financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood.
[29] In his 2008 filings at the European Court of Human Rights,[4] Nada claims he had not been informed of the proceedings against him and that he had therefore never had the possibility of defending himself in person nor of sending a lawyer to represent him.
A 2007 report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) by Swiss Senator Dick Marty described the Nada case as being "like a page out of Kafka".
Criticisms were levied stating that these kind of injustices did not help to fight terrorism, but to promote popular frustrations by persecuting persons without justice and transparency.
[30][31] In 2010, PACE's rapporteur made a third-party submission to the European Court of Human Rights in support of Nada's case against Switzerland (see below), which was ultimately successful.
[citation needed] The Strasbourg court ruled that "Switzerland should have taken all possible measures, within the latitude available to it, to adapt the sanctions regime to the applicant's individual situation".