After a year in Egyptian jail, journalists will attend hearing more in hope than expectation as supporters keep focus on their plight

Three al-Jazeera journalists jailed in Egypt are due back in court on Thursday to appeal against their convictions, over six months after they were sentenced and over a year since they were seized from a Cairo hotel.

The hearing is expected to last for one day, and will only assess whether legal procedures during their first trial were correctly observed, rather than focusing on the facts of the case itself. Based on his findings, the judge can then choose to uphold the original verdict, throw the case out, or send it to retrial, in which case he must also decide whether to release them on bail.

The parents of one of the three, the former BBC correspondent Peter Greste, said they were tempering their expectations. “We have very high hopes for the [hearing], but our expectations are modest,” said Juris and Lois Greste, who were allowed to visit their son in jail on Christmas Day. “We have approached landmark dates expecting a positive change, only to be bitterly disappointed.”

Greste, the former CNN reporter Mohamed Fahmy, and local producer Baher Mohamed were initially jailed last June on charges of abetting terrorists, spreading false news and endangering national security. The move was a prominent episode in an ongoing crackdown on all forms of domestic opposition. But it was also seen as part of a wider diplomatic spat between Egypt and Qatar, the owners of al-Jazeera and the funders of Egypt’s Islamist opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Internationally, the case was viewed as a trumped-up attack on freedom of expression, with the court proceedings considered comically flawed and politicised. But in Egypt, where the coverage on al-Jazeera’s Arabic sister channels strongly favours the brotherhood, many government supporters saw the journalists as a legitimate target.

Since the verdict, Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has several times expressed regret that the journalists were jailed rather than deported, and in November issued a new law that would technically allow him to deport Greste, who is an Australian citizen, and possibly Fahmy, a dual Canadian-Egyptian national. But fearing a backlash among his supporters, he has not yet shown strong intent to use the law, or to issue a pardon.

Officials have privately indicated that he will wait until at least the conclusion of the appeal before taking any decisions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protest in support of the al-Jazeera journalists outside Egypt’s embassy in London. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

In the six months since the verdict, the three defendants have followed different paths to fight their incarceration. Greste and Mohamed, and their families, continue to frame the case as one that purely relates to press freedom.

“The noise you all have been making,” Greste wrote in a Christmas message to his supporters, “sends a clear and unequivocal message to politicians around the world: a free press is an indivisible part of a free society.”

By contrast, Fahmy has positioned himself as a pawn in the battle between Egypt and Qatar, rather than simply the victim of a media crackdown. He has distanced himself from al-Jazeera, issuing messages from jail that condemned the coverage of the network’s Arabic channels, and also criticised al-Jazeera for placing its journalists in danger before their arrest and for failing to secure them better lawyers. He is expected to amplify these claims during the appeal session.

“If the judge looks past our affiliation with al-Jazeera and Qatar, and judges us as journalists who have committed no crime, then we may be freed,” he said in a message to the Guardian delivered from prison by his family. “If he considers us agents of al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr [the network’s Egyptian affiliate] … then we may face a lengthy retrial.”

Fahmy is now paying for his own legal team without money from al-Jazeera. International rights lawyer Amal Clooney is giving pro-bono advice and sending a representative to Thursday’s hearing.

Reporters Without Borders revealed in December that Egypt is the fourth-biggest jailer of journalists in the world, imprisoning 16 in 2014 – 9% of the global total. The government has arrested at least 16,000 political detainees in the past 18 months, by its own figures. Independent estimates suggest the figure is closer to 40,000.