Prisoners in Egypt suffer in jails for dubious crimes
ALREADY faced with the prospect of spending several years in overcrowded and often violent jails, Egypt’s political prisoners are often charged with crimes they allegedly committed while behind bars.
In a practice dubbed by the country’s legal and activist community as “recycling” or “rotation,” inmates can end up in detention indefinitely – even after a court has ordered their release.
Solafa Magdy, 33, a journalist, and her husband Hossam el-Sayed, a photojournalist, were arrested in November 2019 from a cafe in an upmarket Cairo suburb along with a mutual friend.
All three were charged with joining a terror group and publishing false news. In August last year, Magdy was slapped with new charges of misusing social media while in custody, although she had no access to a phone.
“My daughter has been charged in two cases, which is a travesty in its own right. This is not normal,” Taghred Zahran, Solafa’s mother and carer for the couple’s son Khaled, told Agence France Presse (AFP). “I want this nightmare to end. We want to wake up and live our lives.
What we’re going through is surreal,” she added, choking back tears. Amnesty International has said Magdy was forced to undergo a pelvic examination which led to heavy bleeding and that she was strip-searched as well as violently beaten by prison guards.
Rights groups estimate about 60,000 political prisoners are being held in Egyptian jails, in a crackdown on dissent underway since President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi took power in 2014.
Mai el-Sadany, legal director at Washingtonbased think-tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, sees the trend of extended pretrial detention as “a punitive measure” by security forces to silence opposition. Pretrial detention can last up to two years under Egyptian law.
“A detainee who would normally expect to be released or at least begin to see their case heard by the two-year mark can now be rotated into new cases without restriction... There is no end in sight,” Sadany said. “It has become ‘normal’ for defendants to be detained when they are arrested instead of being let go pending trial.”