What is it like to live under President Sisi?
Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi hand-picked Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then field marshal of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, to serve as defence minister in August 2012. The appointment came shortly after Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member, relieved several senior military leaders of their duties. The move was intended to promote a younger generation of army generals, closer to the idea of democratic transition and the notions promoted by the January 2011 popular uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. At the time of his appointment, Sisi was known as a long-time military officer and the former head of military intelligence. A year later, on July 3, 2013, Sisi led a military coup that removed Morsi, following mass protests over a worsening economic and human rights climate. Since the toppling of Morsi, Sisi became increasingly known as the “people’s saviour”. He won the 2014 presidential election with 97 percent of the vote, according to the state’s election commission. Social and civil rights Since Sisi took office in June 2014, human rights conditions in the country have continued to deteriorate, with human rights organisations reporting that around 60,000 people were imprisoned over the past four years. Egypt has built 19 new prisons in the last five years, 16 since Sisi took office. A Human Rights Watch report on Cairo’s notorious Scorpion Prison revealed that most of the inmates were political prisoners, and that they “suffered abuses at the hands of Interior Ministry officers, including beatings, force-feedings, deprivation of contact with relatives and lawyers, and interference in medical care”. Extrajudicial killings rose from 326 in 2015 to 754 in the first half of 2016, according to al-Nadeem Centre, an Egypt-based human rights group that works with victims of torture. In August 2016, the Egyptian Coordination of Rights and Freedoms released a report on prison conditions in Egypt under Sisi’s rule, documenting 1,344 incidents of tor- ture and intentional medical neglect in detention facilities and prisons between 2015 and 2016. In 2014, Sisi issued a decree that granted the military wider jurisdiction, allowing the armed forces to prosecute civilians in military courts. These trials often lack evidence and are solely based on investigations led by national security officers. According to Human Rights Watch, the law has “formed the basis of 7,400 or more military trials of civilians” to date. There are also reports of forced disappearances, with Amnesty International recording three to four disappearances a day between 2015 and 2016. The rights group acknowledged that the number could be much higher, since numerous families fear repercussions for reporting a disappearance.