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Geneva (January 26, 2018) -- Today, several United Nations human rights experts expressed concern over “persistent serious allegations” of unfair trials in Egypt, while calling on the authorities to halt all pending executions.

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.  

On January 18, 2018, Alkarama sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression (SRFRDX) following the arrest of professor and human rights defender Amine Fadha for Facebook posts in which he criticised the government and the army.

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 December 12, 2017, Samir Al Daami, a well-known Iraqi-Norwegian freelance journalist and political commentator, was released after spending nearly two months in prison.

 

“A poem stands accused,

my poem morphs into a crime.

In the land of freedom,

the artist’s fate is prison.”

 

Extract from “A Poet Behind Bars” by Dareen Tatour, translated by Tariq al Haydar

On October 31, 2017, the Saudi Council of Ministers adopted a new “law on combating crimes of terrorism and its financing”*, replacing the repressive Anti-Terrorism Law of 2014.

In November 2017, Alkarama and Al Wissam Humanitarian Assembly submitted 11 cases of missing people in Iraq to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED). These 11 individuals were abducted by either the Iraqi army or the intelligence services in government-controlled areas, the majority over the course of 2014.

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.