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CFJ Methodology and Use of Legal Terminology

The collection and verification of data on human rights violations in Egypt face serious challenges due to the obstructing of free access to information, the Egyptian state’s deliberate obscuring of facts and fair investigation processes and its strive to maintain a de facto impunity of perpetrators. As lawyers, human rights defenders, and families face great risks while conducting their work and following-up with the victims’ conditions, this situation raises the importance of documentation and verification steps that CFJ follows regarding the ongoing violations inside the places of detention. Meanwhile, we underline a facet that all statistics, figures and percentages presented in our reports, only reflect the information that CFJ has been able to collude from 94 places of detention across the country.

Because the Egyptian authorities continue to wipe away, hide, or distort all the incriminating evidences, and because it continues to threaten the safety and liberty of human rights defenders and detainees’ families, and promote a general climate of horror and fear of retaliation, we as CFJ stress on the following:

(1) our constant pursuit of protecting our information and sources identity through the most secure electronic data collection, documentation, and archiving systems to prevent endangering our personnel and all our collaborators;

(2) that all figures and statistics in CFJ reports are subject to change, upward and downward, across all place, time, and violation identifiers, should a  climate of public freedoms occurs, in which case the freedom of information, free expression of grievance, and the prosecution of perpetuators will enable the disclosure of the true number of violation incidents inside the places of detention;

(3) until then, all CFJ statistics reflect the information made available to our team members and is short of presenting representative random samples, with scientific authority, of the ongoing human rights violations, and;

(4) yet, our data exposes the broader patterns of violation and sheds light on the progressing and systematic infringement of human rights amid pressuring political and security constraints.

We argue that we present the very least effort in supporting the oppressed and pressuring, locally and internationally, for a just and safe judicial system in Egypt.