On January 16, 2017, the High Administrative Court of Egypt blocked the transfer of two uninhabited Egyptian islands in the Red Sea, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia. According to a news article, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stated that “the islands had always belonged to Saudi Arabia and that Riyadh had asked Egypt to station troops there in 1950 to protect them,” while the group of attorneys challenging the move “argued that a 1906 maritime treaty between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire stated that the islands were Egyptian.” The Court determined that the government failed to present evidence that the islands originally belonged to Saudi Arabia and “said it was the ‘unanimous’ decision of its judges that Tiran and Sanafir were sovereign Egyptian territories.”