Articles for Egypt

Geneva (January 25, 2018) – Marking the seven-year anniversary of the beginning of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the Alkarama Foundation has today published an extensive report on Egypt’s widespread and pervasive crackdown on freedom of expression.  

In the morning of January 2, 2018, four men sentenced to death in the Kafr El Sheikh Stadium bombing case following a grossly unfair trial were executed at the Burj Al Arab Prison of Alexandria. The families of Lotfy Ibrahim Ismail Khalil, Ahmed Abdul Hadi Al Seheemy, Sameh Abdullah Mohamed Youssef and Ahmed Abd Al Moenem Salama Ahmed Salama were not officially informed of the date of executions, in violation of Egyptian Criminal Law.

Background

On November 20, 2017, Mohamed Khaled Mustafa Alqamhawy, a 29-year-old mechanical engineer, was at work when members of the Police and State Security Forces, some wearing uniforms while others wearing plainclothes and carrying weapons, entered the factory and searched the place. They arrested Alqamhawy without any warrant and without explaining the reasons and took him to an unknown location. Alqamhawy remains missing since.

November 24, 2017

To: His Excellency Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Re: Call for action to condemn the Egyptian authorities’ crackdown on freedom of expression

Mr High Commissioner,

We, the undersigned organisations, are writing to express our great concern about the current human rights situation in Egypt.

On November 4, 2017, Mohamed Mohamed Mohamed Emam, a 60-year-old builder, was at the departure gate of the Cairo airport about to board his flight to Kenya when he was asked by members of the airport security to follow them to the security office. Emam was escorted by security officers while passengers waiting to board the same flight witnessed the scene.

Despite the official denial of human rights violations by Egyptian authorities, abuses committed by the security forces continue unabated in the country. Alkarama has documented three new cases of enforced disappearances that occurred in the Beheira Governorate between April and October 2017 following abductions by State Security Forces and the police.

On September 5,   Alkarama sent an urgent appeal to the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) concerning the case of Abdellah Mohamed Ahmed, a 20-year-old student who has been disappeared since he was violently abducted on July 31, 2017 while on his way home from the mosque.

On September 10, 2017, Ebrahim Metwally was abducted at Cairo International Airport as he was about to board a flight to Geneva to attend a meeting with the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID). He was subsequently held incommunicado for two days.

A reporter for the Freedom and Justice newspaper and correspondent of Al Jazeera in the Suez Governorate, 30-year-old Abdul Rahman Shaheen has been detained by Egyptian authorities since 2014 in retaliation for his work as a journalist.

Shaheen had been wanted by the National Security forces since 2013 after he covered the peaceful protests in Suez against the military coup, as well as the repression and abuses committed against the protesters.

Arrest and trial

After a four-year-long confidential inquiry triggered by Alkarama, members of the Committee Against Torture (CAT) issued their conclusions, stating that the practice of torture is “habitual, widespread and deliberate” in Egypt. These conclusions are based on a wide range of cases of violations and an analysis of their structural causes, all of which were provided to the CAT by Alkarama between 2012 and 2016.