Tony Shenouda (pseudonym)
For two months, Afaf*, a decor engineer in her sixties, kept travelling a distance of one hundred kilometres there and back, carrying a bag containing food and psychiatric medication, to visit her son, Zein*, in one of the prisons located west of Cairo. But she would return home deeply disappointed, withdrawing to her room to go on crying alone, because she was unable to see her son, as he had been placed in the disciplinary ward and denied visits and the receipt of provisions and medicine.
Afaf did not give up, and managed to speak with her son for a few seconds through a small window, covered with iron wire, fixed at the top of the prisoner transport vehicle that carries detainees from the prison to detention renewal hearings at the courts. At that time he told her about “his being subjected to torture”; she hurried to the prison and registered a request for an exceptional visit, and after stalling she was allowed a visit lasting only ten minutes.
The voice of Zein’s mother (the voice has been altered to protect privacy)
During the visit, Zein hurried towards an isolated corner, trying to hide from the surveillance cameras, and gestured with his hands for her to come closer, and the mother found him barefoot. Zein pushed his fingers through the openings of the iron fence and said to her: “Look, they pulled out my nails, Mother.” He took off his jacket and turned around to show her traces of what appears to be torture on his back, and he also rolled up his trousers to show her burn marks that he says were caused by “the guards stubbing out their cigarettes on his body”. The mother was shocked by what she saw, and Zein asked her to hurry and file a complaint with the Public Prosecution.
The next morning, Afaf submitted a complaint to the head of the Plenary Prosecution, attaching to it Zein’s medical record issued by government hospitals, and requested that an investigation into the incident be opened and that her son be examined by forensic medicine to establish the injuries he had sustained.
Zein is one of 1,569 Egyptians who spoke of being subjected to individual and collective torture inside places of detention between 2017 and 2023, according to the “Archive of Oppression” reports issued by the El Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture. The centre stresses that these figures represent only “the tip of the iceberg”, as many violations take place in secret, away from documentation or monitoring. The centre also points out that what appears in the archive is limited to what has been gathered from the media and the various social media sites.
The author of this investigation conducted interviews with five cases who have been released, in addition to another prisoner who is still behind bars, all of whom submitted complaints to the Public Prosecution and before judges regarding what they said was their subjection to torture and sexual violence at the hands of policemen during interrogation sessions. Members of the prosecution took no action other than recording their pleas for help in the session records, without any actual investigation.
We obtained judicial documents that document the reliance of the public prosecution authorities on the police apparatus itself to gather information and evidence and to bring witnesses concerning incidents of torture; incidents in which members of this very apparatus are one of the parties. These inquiries often end up being shelved “owing to the impossibility of gathering information”.
Reports by human rights organisations, local and international, in addition to the United Nations Committee against Torture, point to the Public Prosecution’s neglect in opening investigations, which reinforces impunity for perpetrators of torture.
According to Article 52 of the Egyptian Constitution, torture in all its forms and types is a crime not subject to a statute of limitations. Inquiries are the first step in gathering evidence concerning crimes; inquiries mean collecting all the indications and evidence that help to reach the truth, and the prosecution does not carry them out itself but relies on the police to conduct them.
The work of the police in gathering evidence is subject to the supervision, oversight and direction of members of the Public Prosecution, under Articles “189 and 199” of the Egyptian Constitution and Articles “21, 23 and 199” of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
A research study issued by Human Rights Watch, entitled “Impunity for perpetrators and denial of justice to victims in torture cases”, indicates that involving the police in investigating incidents of torture gives rise to a conflict of interest and contributes to the absence of serious investigation into reports of detainees being subjected to torture.
Despite the need to amend the law to guarantee accountability for perpetrators of torture crimes, attempts to make these amendments were met with repression.
Shelving the complaint
The prosecution does not merely shelve torture complaints; its members may even pressure complainants to withdraw them, as happened in the case of Abdel Rahman Tarek, who says he was tortured at the hands of a police officer.
Tarek, known as “Moka”, recounts how the deputy prosecutor tried to intimidate him out of filing a complaint against the head of investigations at the Qasr El-Nil police station, in central Cairo, stating that the latter had assaulted him with beatings during the period in which he was serving a sentence of daily police supervision inside the station.
George Ishak, a former member of the National Council for Human Rights, supported “Moka” by submitting a complaint to the General Administration for Human Rights at the Public Prosecutor’s office; the deputy prosecutor then summoned the latter to hear his statement as a victim.
“Moka” says he was surprised when the deputy prosecutor warned him against his complaint against the officer and urged him to withdraw it, for fear that the officer would fabricate a case against him and send him back to the prison where he had spent several years on a charge of demonstrating against the referral of civilians to military trials.
“Moka” says he rejected the prosecution’s warning and insisted on his complaint, and afterwards he was imprisoned again.
“Moka” continues, saying: “I told the prosecution that there were surveillance cameras installed throughout the station when I was assaulted. I asked the prosecution to retrieve the camera footage to prove the guilt of the officer who assaulted me, but the prosecution did not lift a finger.”
“Moka” spent seven years inside prison, during which he attempted suicide by taking a mixture of different drugs, in protest at being denied a radio charger and the receipt of food prepared by his family, at being verbally insulted, and at being placed in the disciplinary ward. The prison administration transferred him to hospital, where he was saved, according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms.
“Moka” insisted on continuing his protest against conditions inside the prisons, including his subjection to torture, saying: “I submitted many complaints to the prosecution while I was inside prison, but the prosecution did not respond and paid no attention.”
Moka is certain that what happened to him is repeated in other cases, citing Tarek El-Selkawy: “Tarek El-Selkawy, a lawyer at the Coordination for Human Rights organisation, can no longer move and is unable to walk, as a result of the electric-shock torture and the beatings he was subjected to during the period of his enforced disappearance at the State Security headquarters.”
Permanent disability
In the middle of a November night in 2018, regular and irregular forces (wearing civilian clothes) stormed El-Selkawy’s home in Mansoura (about 126 kilometres north of Cairo) and arrested him, before he was forcibly disappeared for 24 days, during which his lawyers’ efforts to learn the reason for his detention and his whereabouts failed, according to complaints his lawyers sent to the Public Prosecutor, the head of the “Mansoura Second District” Prosecution, and the Advocate General of the Mansoura prosecution offices.
According to a research study issued by El Nadeem Center entitled “Archive of Oppression” in 2017, enforced disappearance is not free of the torture of the disappeared.
Before his arrest, Tarek suffered from bouts of chronic migraine that caused him to lose awareness and balance; he regularly visited a neurologist and had been taking medication daily for a long time, with a medical recommendation that he avoid physical and nervous strain.
The judicial documents show the National Security officer assigned to arrest El-Selkawy affirming that the latter was in a normal condition at the moment of his arrest; however, after the period of enforced disappearance, El-Selkawy appeared at six in the evening on 24 November 2018 before the State Security Prosecution carried on the shoulders of security men, as a result of hemiplegia affecting his left arm and leg.
The National Security officer claimed, according to the documents, that El-Selkawy was arrested at his home at ten in the evening on 23 November 2018, that is, the day before he was brought before the prosecution, which the prosecution accepted, ignoring any investigation into the accuracy of the date. Nor did it examine the complaint of El-Selkawy and his lawyers concerning the torture he was subjected to, which caused his inability to move, according to El-Selkawy.
Amnesty International stated that State Security Prosecution prosecutors ignored investigating complaints submitted by the families and lawyers of those arrested concerning what they described as National Security’s “falsification” of the arrest dates in 87 out of 117 cases, as the arrest dates were recorded as the day immediately preceding the prosecution’s interrogation. Despite multiple telegrams being sent by the families and lawyers, the public prosecutors took no action to investigate what was stated in those telegrams.
Although the Public Prosecutor and his assistants paid no attention to the previous complaints, El-Selkawy’s defence continued to send one complaint after another, in the hope of an investigation that would reveal the identity of those he said had tortured him and refer them for trial.
On 18 March 2019, the prosecution responded and summoned El-Selkawy’s defence, which requested that its client be summoned from his place of detention and questioned about the identity of those who had tortured him; the prosecution then decided to assign the investigations unit of the Mansoura First District police station to gather information about the incident.
El-Selkawy is still behind bars, unable to move, serving a 15-year prison sentence on the basis of a confession he says was extracted from him under torture.
Fighting proposals to amend the law
Articles 63 and 232 of Egypt’s Code of Criminal Procedure bar torture victims from filing lawsuits directly before the criminal courts, as this power is granted exclusively to the Public Prosecutor, in whose office the majority of torture complaints are often shelved without any defendant being referred for trial, according to Mohamed Obeid, a legal researcher specialising in the constitutional critique of legislation.
This is what prompted the Arab Penal Reform Organisation, which is headquartered in Geneva, to turn to the civil courts. The organisation recorded in its archive 5,821 civil rulings awarding compensation for torture, issued by the judiciary between 1991 and 2017.
Mohamed Zarea, the organisation’s director, explains: “After the final ruling is issued, we begin by writing to the Ministry of Interior to implement the ruling and pay the amount of compensation, but the limited budget the ministry allocated to this item meant that survivors would wait for periods ranging between three and eight years to receive the compensation owed to them.”
By contrast, flimsy penalties are imposed on those convicted of committing torture crimes. The Egyptian Commission revealed a list of 63 officers and police personnel convicted by the judiciary of premeditated murder, torture, and beating that led to the death of citizens; nevertheless, the Court of Cassation acquitted 20 of the defendants, while the President of the Republic issued pardon decisions for 23 others. As for the rest, they received prison sentences ranging between only three and seven years.
Mohamed Obeid, a legal researcher specialising in the constitutional critique of legislation, points out that loopholes in Article 126 of the Egyptian Penal Code weaken the penalties imposed on perpetrators of torture, as its application is restricted by strict conditions that push the Public Prosecution to bring lesser misdemeanour charges, such as “use of cruelty”, whose penalty does not exceed one year’s imprisonment or a fine of no more than EGP 200. In cases where the victim dies, the crime is classified as “beating leading to death”, a crime that carries a lighter penalty than that prescribed for torture leading to premeditated murder.
The inability of the law currently in force to punish the perpetrators of torture, which is criminalised by the constitution, prompted some civil society institutions to propose amending it.
Between 2014 and 2015, the United Group, founded by lawyer Negad El-Borai, submitted 163 complaints concerning 465 allegations of torture inside places of detention, but the Public Prosecution took no action regarding those complaints, which prompted the group to resort to the Judicial Inspection to ensure that investigations were conducted promptly.
In March 2015, the group held an experts’ workshop to present and discuss a draft law to combat the crime of torture, in line with the provisions of the constitution and consistent with international standards, according to what the group announced.
The draft law was sent to the Presidency of the Republic and a number of relevant ministries, but the bodies to which the draft was sent did not engage with it. On the contrary, the two judges who took part in drafting the bill were referred for investigation, and El-Borai was summoned to the North Giza Court to give his statement as part of the investigations being conducted with the two judges, who faced six charges, including “preparing a draft law against torture, pressuring the President of the Republic to issue it, and dealing with an illegitimate organisation”.
Mocking the testimonies
In a room at the National Security Agency headquarters in the Abbasiya district, Shorouk Amgad says she went through a painful experience. The woman in her twenties recounts the details of unforgettable moments, when she was blindfolded and forced to sit on a chair, tied from behind, while her body convulsed under successive electric shocks. The shocks were repeated until her body collapsed, until she heard one of them say to another: “The girl is going to die”, according to her account.
Shorouk Amgad says
that she woke up to find an officer trying to undo the buttons of her trousers; she was seized by a panic attack and screamed at the top of her voice: “Nobody touch me! I’ll say everything you want!” At that moment, the officer’s colleagues rushed into the room and sat her down on a chair, and under the weight of intimidation Shorouk broke down and began giving her statement: “I work as a journalist, and I write political and economic reports for satellite channels opposed to the Egyptian regime.”
Shorouk indicates that her interrogation lasted for eight continuous hours, during which she felt the pain and bleeding of her period, and she asked for permission to go to the toilet, but the officer mocked her, saying: “I am happy with how you look”, and from time to time threatened her with rape and a virginity examination.
The voice of Shorouk Amgad
The torture we documented was not limited to physical punishment but extended to sexual violence: the Egyptian Front for Human Rights documented 58 cases of sexual violence against women inside National Security headquarters between 2015 and 2022. These violations included touching of the genitals (about 33%), threats of rape (approximately 24%), forced stripping (approximately 19%), electric shocks to the genitals (about 12%), and rape in its various forms (12%).
When Shorouk appeared before the deputy prosecutor, her features appeared affected by the assault: her mouth was twisted from the effects of the beating, and she had bruises on her hands from the electric shocks. There were also other marks of beating on her body. Shorouk recounted everything that had happened to her.
The deputy prosecutor refused to record her testimony or refer her to forensic medicine, and merely wrote the following phrase in the session record: “Shorouk received a punch from the person who arrested her.” At the same time, he told her that the investigation into the assaults she had suffered would be conducted later.
About three months later, another deputy prosecutor summoned Shorouk and asked her: “Do you want to be referred to forensic medicine?” Shorouk refused, because the traces of torture had faded with the passage of time, according to her account.
Shorouk expresses her dismay at the deputy prosecutor’s handling of her complaint, saying: “He treated the investigation I had requested as if it were a routine procedure, just something to be written down, without showing any engagement with my account, and he displayed a kind of mockery.”
The voice of Shorouk Amgad
Sexual violence in prisons
Although searches of genital cavities are considered a routine procedure on entering prison or on returning from court sessions, they have, according to the testimonies of three survivors and reports by human rights organisations, turned into violations of an explicitly sexual nature.
Shorouk recounts: “The guard began feeling my body in a way that was not normal. She came close to my chest and grabbed it without explanation, then moved to the bikini area, and raised her head to ask me: ‘Are you a virgin?’ I answered in a faint voice: ‘Yes, I am a virgin.’ She replied in a sharp tone: ‘We’re going to examine you.'”
Shorouk continues: “She asked me to turn around and bend over, and when I did I felt her hand pressing on my neck and forcing me to bend further until my head was level with my feet… Suddenly, she inserted her finger into the vaginal opening without any medical glove. It was a horrifying moment; I screamed in severe pain and burst into tears.”
On one occasion, Shorouk remembers: “As soon as I entered the room, the guard began slowly touching my hand, then her hand reached to sensitive areas of my body and grabbed them without hesitation, leaving a feeling of terror taking hold of me.”
According to the “Egyptian Front”, what Shorouk recounted was repeated in other cases and meets the definition of sexual rape. This is what we documented when we traced the intersections between Shorouk’s case and the case of Mariam Moussa*, who is undergoing psychological support sessions in an attempt to erase, in vain, from her memory what she says are the effects of her subjection to sexual violence inside Qanater Women’s Prison (25 kilometres north of Cairo).
Mariam says: “I saw the jailer coming towards me with steady steps. She threw white clothes at me and took me to a toilet at the end of the corridor. She ordered me to take off my clothes, and I thought she meant the coloured clothes, so I took them off; then she firmly ordered me, ‘These too’, pointing to my underwear. I stood stunned for a few moments, not understanding what she meant. Did she really want me to stand naked in front of her? The idea was terrifying to me: how could I stand naked in front of her?!”
Mariam continues: “I stood naked, trembling and crying in a muffled voice. Suddenly, she grabbed my hair hard. I only wished this hell would end, but this was just the beginning. She turned me towards the wall and pressed on my back to make me bend over, then moved her hand to more intimate places and tampered with my genitals. I was shocked, I froze in place, unable to move or scream; all I could do was cry silently… My body collapsed completely; other prisoners carried me while I was shaking, and I suffered bleeding that lasted a whole week.”
Mariam says: “This was not the first time I had been tortured; I had previously been hung like a slaughtered animal and subjected to electric shocks in other places, but what happened that day truly broke me; it destroyed me physically and psychologically.”
According to testimonies documented by human rights organisations such as the “Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms” and the “Egyptian Front for Human Rights”, survivors revealed shocking incidents of sexual violence while being transferred to prison or returning from court. In those moments, female jailers accompany the female detainees to toilets or closed rooms, where they are asked to take off all their clothes. The jailer’s hand reaches for the detainee’s breast, and sometimes she picks up a plastic bag from the floor, puts it over her fingers and pushes two or three fingers into the vagina under the pretext of searching. These practices are known as “forced vaginal searches”.
Mariam gathered her strength and resolved to file a complaint against the jailer named “Hanem” at the hearing before the deputy prosecutor, but found nothing from him except mockery of the incident; then he “closed the record without allowing my statements to be written down and recorded in the session record, and justified his action by his lack of jurisdiction… The session ended with my detention being renewed pending investigation on a charge of joining a terrorist group”, according to her account.
Mariam’s lawyer submitted a complaint to the Public Prosecutor, which we have seen, demanding that the warden of Qanater Prison, the head of the prison’s investigations unit and the jailer named “Hanem” be summoned and investigated on a charge of “indecent assault on a female”, under Article 268 of the Penal Code, but he did not receive any notice that an investigation into the matter had been opened.
After the complaint, the prison administration used devices designated for searching, which had been kept in storage without being used, and after a while it went back to conducting manual vaginal searches, according to the Egyptian Commission.
The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners (the Bangkok Rules, Rule 20) recommend adopting alternative screening methods, such as the use of scanners, to avoid resorting to invasive body searches, including cavity searches and intimate body searches, in order to limit the harmful psychological and physical effects that may result from these practices.
According to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, prosecution offices often refrain from opening a separate investigation into complaints of harassment and sexual violence against female detainees, and refuse to carry out their task as an investigating authority.
Although Solafa Magdy, who works as a journalist, was trying to recover from complex surgery to remove a tumour in her uterus, the prison walls held nothing for her but more pain. She says that on one occasion she was forced to take off all her clothes in the search room, to face a harsh vaginal search without any regard for her health condition. That was not enough; she was also subjected to a forced uterine examination, which caused her severe bleeding that lasted for months.
When she tried to object, she was punished physically and psychologically. Solafa made her complaint before the judge, saying: “I was subjected to systematic harassment; a forced examination that caused me prolonged bleeding, and dragging inside the prison.”
We did not receive a response from the Public Prosecutor’s office in Egypt to what was stated in this investigation, despite contacting it within the framework of the right of reply.
* Pseudonyms
This investigation was produced with the support of ARIJ
