Articles for Egypt

14 August 2014 marks the first anniversary of the killing of al-Rabaa Adawiya and el-Nahda squares in Cairo, which claimed the lives of over a thousand Egyptians who came to demonstrate peacefully against the military coup on 3 July 2013.

Despite the unanimous condemnation of human rights NGOs and much of the international community, shocked by the scale of the massacre, no investigation has been conducted by the Egyptian authorities to establish the responsibilities for this tragedy.

Akarama sent an urgent appeal today to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, concerning the abduction by the Egyptian police of Fathi Abdelradi Abdelsalam Reda on 3 August 2014. Last seen on 4 August, his family fears he will be subjected to ill-treatment during his secret detention.

On 18 April 2014, members of the Egyptian Homeland security abducted seven women on the same day in Assiut. One of them, Asma Khelf Chendine Abdelmajid, a young doctor working at Al Qasr Hospital was arrested in front of several witnesses as she was leaving work after a night shift. The authorities deny detaining her, raising strong concerns over her fate.

On 26 June 2014, the Egyptian Ministry of Solidarity put forward a draft law regulating associations that would give the government and security agencies veto power over all activities of associations in Egypt. Concerned about this draft law that bears many resemblances with the law that was in force under Mubarak and violates both the Egyptian constitution and international law, Alkarama wrote to the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association to intervene with the Egyptian authorities so that they refrain from adopting it.

On June 28, Egyptian police forces have arrested an Egyptian student, Ramadan Omar, as he was visiting a relative detained in Abu Zaabel's prison in Cairo. The 20-year old student is one of the several victims, often anonymous, of enforced disappearance, a practice which seems to be reappearing in a systematic manner in the country.

On Friday 3 July, exactly one year after the coup, Alkarama has submitted an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances to call on the Egyptian authorities to release immediately Fouad Kandil, General Secretary for the Western region of the Freedom and Justice Party, held incommunicado since the 15th of June.

On 4 March 2014, Basem Mohsen Hassan Elkhoribi was abducted on Port Said Street of Mansoura by security forces along with his friend Eng Ayman Farag. The authorities keep on denying his detention despite several steps taken by his family to find him.

Alkarama has sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearance asking for his immediate release.

On 7 May 2014, five Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been sentenced, under fabricated charges, to one year of prison by the Military Supreme Court of Qena.

Within a month, the Al Minya Criminal Court handed down in two separate verdicts 1212 death sentences following blatantly unfair and speedy trials in relation to the demonstrations that happened on 14 August 2013. In the first case, 37 Muslim Brotherhood supporters had their death sentence, issued on 24 March 2014, upheld, while the 491 remaining accused had their sentence commuted into life imprisonment. In the second case, 683 alleged supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi, including the Muslim Brotherhood's leader Mohammed Badie, were also sentenced to death on 28 April 2014.

Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel and Ahmed Douma are amongst the first Egyptian activists to be convicted on the basis of the new restrictive assembly law n°107-2013. On 22 December 2013, they were sentenced by the Abdeen Misdemeanour Appeals Court to three years of imprisonment for having allegedly "demonstrated without permission" and "assaulting the police" and are currently being unlawfully detained in Tora Prison.