Following CFJ’s previous periodic reports on human rights violations against individuals who are under the custody of law enforcement officers and security agencies in the Egyptian places of detention, this report proceeds to provide an analytical overview of the human rights situation in Egypt during January and February 2020; while holding the authorities accountable for their obligations mandated by law (Egyptian Constitution, Egyptian Criminal Law, as well as International Human Rights Treaties that Egypt has signed).
The end objective of our periodic reports is to:
- Inform national and international stakeholders of the ongoing conditions inside Egyptian places of detention.
- Engage, or demand the engagement of authorities, into a dialogue that can serve in coherent and consistent strategies and legislations that end these violations; and
- Raise awareness of the ongoing violations of human rights inside places of detention.
Thereof, key findings that Detention Watch has reached- during the period covered by this report- can be summarized as follows:
- Overall, we documented 1,030 violations against 327 individuals in January-February 2020.
- Of these, 624 violations have occurred in central and public prisons while 202 violations took place in police stations.
- Tora prisons Complex accounted for 198 of all documented violations.
- When analyzed by geographical distribution, 239 violations took places in Cairo only during the report period. Besides, 157 and 137 violations occurred in Alexandria and Minya governorates in January, while 83 and 48 violations occurred in Minoufiyya and Sharqiyya governorates in February 2020.
- Male victims’ share of total documented violations amounted to 78% and 98% in January and February, respectively.
- Of all documented cases, CFJ was able to verify 353 violations against 33 victims during the report duration. Violations varied across:
- By gender: 349 verified violations against male and 4 against female victims.
- By profession: political activists and students’ share of total verified violations was around 50 percent in both months.
- By geographical distribution: Cairo and Sharqiyya headed a list of at least 11 governorates with 128 and 58 violations during the report period.
- 65 percent (230 of 353) of verified violations took place in prisons and National Security Premises.
- Enforced Disappearance: we documented 144 enforced disappearances, and the appearance of 98 persons before investigation authorities, of which we were able to verify 44 cases of enforced disappearance during the report period.
- Arbitrary deprivation of liberty: we documented 284 violations divided between 214 cases of arbitrary arrests, 29 cases of renewed detention and 41 cases of retraining of individuals’ movement. Among those cases, we managed to verify 53 incidents, divided to 31 cases of arbitrary arrests and 22 cases of renewed detention.
- Extra-judicial killing: we documented 24 deaths inside the places of detention, including 8 cases of summary execution, 15 deaths resulting from denial of medical care, and one death by torture.
- Poor detention conditions: we documented 487 and verified 214 violations under this category, divided as follows:
- Ill-treatment: we documented 398 and verified 127 violations in at least 14 places of detention.
- Deportation (to a remote detention facility): we only documented 24 deportation (to a remote detention facility) cases. Our team could not reach the families of victims of these violations.
- Denial of medical care: we documented 65 cases of denial of medical, of which we verified 87 incidents during the report duration.
- Torture: we documented 91 torture incidents divided between 33 physical and 58 moral/psychological torture and managed to verify 40 of those torture incidents during the report duration.
