{"id":18534,"date":"2024-07-02T15:20:47","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T13:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=18534"},"modified":"2026-10-09T01:20:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T23:20:00","slug":"prisons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/prisons\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Death: Egyptian Detention Facilities Between Two Eras"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, since President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi came to power, deaths and violations recorded inside detention facilities have escalated; but they have been surrounded by great secrecy, which keeps what is known about the circumstances of these cases, their causes and the parties responsible for them limited, aided by the media blackout and the lack of freedom of information. Nevertheless, human rights organisations and defenders have tried to document these violations.<\/p>\n

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A recent report<\/a> issued in May by the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture documented 314 violations, compared with 343 in April, including six deaths resulting from medical negligence and detention conditions (compared with two in April), nine cases of torture (compared with eight in April), 36 cases of harassment and four cases of collective harassment (compared with ten in April), 21 cases of “recycling” defendants into new cases (compared with 78 in April), 19 cases of deliberate medical negligence (compared with 15 in April), 19 cases of enforced disappearance (compared with 17 in April), the reappearance of 171 forcibly disappeared persons after varying periods of disappearance (compared with 137 in April), and 29 cases of state violence (compared with 40 in April).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A report by the Committee for Justice<\/a>, an informal human rights organisation, also revealed that it documented about 3,537 violations in Egypt in 2023, as part of its project “Monitoring Violations Inside Egyptian Prisons and Detention Centres”, which highlighted some of the most important developments in the human rights situation in Egypt and documented the violations against victims inside the country’s detention centres and facilities. According to the report, the violations took place in 49 detention facilities and fell into multiple patterns, the largest share being arbitrary deprivation of liberty (about 90%), with 3,185 documented violations, followed by enforced disappearance with 174 documented violations, then 106 related to poor detention conditions, followed by torture and deaths inside detention facilities, with 36 violations each.<\/p>\n

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Death in Detention Facilities Under Mubarak<\/h3>\n

According to a report by the Egyptian Front for Human Rights<\/a>, citizens’ relationship with the criminal justice system (specifically State Security, the civilian police and the Central Security Forces) was one of the most prominent issues in criminal justice in Egypt over the past twenty years, and one of the main reasons for the 2011 revolution, as the Mubarak regime was characterised by the expansion of internal security agencies into public and civil life and the application of the emergency law, which granted the security authorities broad powers against citizens, especially after the Islamist insurgency erupted in the late 1980s and through the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The State Security Investigations service (now National Security) was known for using torture and relying on coercive interrogation methods, yet only a few such cases came to light in the period before the 2011 revolution. The Egyptian Front for Human Rights attributes the scarcity of documentation to several considerations, some of which may relate to the lack of broad, specialised coverage of this type of violation and of security conduct, and also to the service’s deliberate practice of “calculated and measured<\/strong>” violations, usually carried out with medical care present at torture and interrogation sessions to ensure the person stayed alive, which kept deaths<\/a> to a minimum.<\/p>\n

The civilian police also had a large share of these practices, as the violations recorded at the time were concentrated in torture or sexual violations by police officers in police detention facilities, against women and men alike.<\/p>\n

Among the most prominent examples is the case of driver Emad El-Kabir<\/a>, dating back to 2006, when he was detained by police at the Bulaq El-Dakrour station (in Giza Governorate), who tortured and sexually assaulted him. This was proven after a video circulated, forcing the authorities to put the officer responsible on trial, and he and a cooperating police sergeant received a sentence<\/a> of only three years in prison. Another video showed a woman being beaten and subjected to severe violence inside a detention facility, who turned out to be an employee of the Maspero Radio and Television Building. Human rights lawyer Nasser Amin raised that case at the time, in what became known in the media as the “torture clips<\/a>” case.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the most prominent killings in which the police were accused under the Mubarak regime, and which received media and popular support, were the killing of Khaled Said, and of Sayed Bilal, who died a few days before the revolution broke out. Journalist and blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy<\/a> documented some of these cases at the time, such as the killing of street vendor Mohamed Hassan in 2004 at the hands of the Azbakeya police station in downtown Cairo. According to El-Hamalawy, the killings also reached minors<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Despite strong denial of the incidents, that phase ended with the conviction of at least six police officers between 2006 and 2009. Penalties ranged from imprisonment on these charges to suspension from work, transfer to administrative duties, or transfer to other, distant police detention facilities.<\/p>\n

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The Current Era<\/h3>\n

According to the Egyptian Front’s report, after 2013 Egyptian prisons received broad local and international human rights attention because of the prevalence of deaths inside detention facilities, especially with the increase in the number of detainees (political, criminal and others), estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000 prisoners.<\/p>\n

As the number of detainees grew, their conditions worsened, and last year nine human rights organisations<\/a> came out demanding disclosure of the real number of prisoners in Egyptian prisons, pointing out that the last official disclosure was in the 1990s, and that:<\/p>\n

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“In recent years, the Egyptian authorities have regularly published videos and other propaganda material about new detention facilities that present a good image of the treatment of prisoners, while barring all places of detention from independent inspection by journalists and non-governmental organisations.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the same time, the authorities tolerate violent practices by the civilian police, National Security and security forces working on cases of a political nature, especially forces working in counter-terrorism, as described by human rights organisations. This was reflected in legal amendments, most notably in the Anti-Terrorism Law<\/a> issued in 2015, which allows law enforcement forces to use force in confrontations without accountability or review.<\/p>\n

This comes despite constitutional and legal provisions regulating detention conditions that are not actually applied. The 2014 Egyptian Constitution, amended in 2019, included a number of constitutional provisions establishing the general principles that guarantee the right to life and physical safety. Article 52 of the Constitution clearly criminalises torture, stating that “torture in all its forms and types is a crime that is not subject to a statute of limitations”.<\/p>\n

Article 54 of the Constitution requires that people whose liberty is restricted be enabled to contact their relatives and lawyers immediately to inform them of the detention, stating: “Every person whose liberty is restricted shall be informed immediately of the reasons for it, shall be notified of his rights in writing, and shall be enabled to contact his relatives and lawyer immediately.” Article 55 adds: “Every person who is arrested, detained or has his liberty restricted shall be treated in a manner that preserves his dignity. He may not be tortured, intimidated, coerced, or physically or morally harmed, and he may only be held or detained in places designated for that purpose that are humanely and hygienically appropriate.”<\/p>\n

In terms of legislation, laws such as the Code of Criminal Procedure No. 150 of 1950 regulate the bodies responsible for arrest and detention, their responsibilities and their supervision, and Article 91 bis of the Prisons Regulation Law provides for punishing any public official who places, or orders the placement of, a person deprived of liberty in any form in places other than legal detention facilities, a practice common in detentions carried out by National Security.<\/p>\n

Article 20 bis of the Prisons Regulation Law, as amended by Law 106 of 2015, provides that anyone deprived of liberty in prisons without a court ruling shall receive the treatment prescribed for pretrial detainees, which includes access to basic necessities such as furnished rooms and other needs, which may include treatment.<\/p>\n

The laws and regulations governing prisons in Egypt include provisions on prisoners’ health, since prisoners are expected to serve their sentences in detention facilities for periods of time, which means that the prison administration is legally responsible for their safety and protection until they complete their sentences.<\/p>\n

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Death Under El-Sisi<\/h3>\n

The Front says in its latest report that, unlike the years of the Mubarak regime, when police stations attracted attention amid increasing cases of torture and death inside them, institutions such as prisons have joined the list, accounting for the largest share of incidents and allegations of physical abuse and death, in addition to extrajudicial killings in unknown facilities, most likely belonging to National Security in Egypt.<\/p>\n

The deteriorating situation also includes the involvement of other parties and institutions in these incidents, unlike the usual situation in the Mubarak years, such as justice institutions like the Public Prosecution, and some workers in the medical sector affiliated with the Ministry of Interior and the Prisons Authority.<\/p>\n

The deaths recorded since 2013 include deaths resulting from torture and physical abuse, but they are accompanied by two new patterns that have come to the surface, which can be classified as indirect causes of death, yet raise the question of the legal and material responsibility of the security and police agencies in all cases: medical illness and violence between prisoners.<\/p>\n

A number of cases have indeed been recorded involving violations such as detention without legal basis and physical assault on the victim in front of witnesses or other citizens.<\/p>\n

The deaths of a number of victims<\/a> already held in police stations were recorded, after they were interrogated by National Security officers at the station and subjected to sessions of torture and severe physical assault that ended in their deaths. This pattern is prominent and prevalent among victims accused in political cases, some of whom were actually serving sentences inside the station.<\/p>\n

Recent years have seen another pattern of killing: killing in public places outside detention facilities at the hands of civilian police forces. One case is that of a citizen in Minya accused of drug dealing, whose death was the subject of conflicting accounts: the official account attributed his killing to the use of force against the arresting forces while he tried to escape, while the victim’s family and lawyer asserted that a verbal altercation broke out between the officer and the deceased, leading the latter to flee and the police to chase him, shooting him dead<\/a> during the pursuit.<\/p>\n

The Egyptian Front<\/a> has documented cases of citizens killed in unknown places, including a citizen arrested at his home and taken to an unknown place for 12 days, which ended with National Security summoning his wife to inform her of his death and directing her to bury the victim without a proper funeral.<\/p>\n

There is a second pattern<\/strong>, abundant in individuals’ stories and testimonies, which can be called “peer killing<\/strong>” and is widespread in police stations, where there are several cases of violence among detainees in station lock-ups, in several cases reaching serious and fatal injuries, and in others death. Human rights defenders attribute this pattern to the poor detention conditions in which prisoners use violence and assault against one another in disputes over space in detention rooms.<\/p>\n

The third pattern<\/strong>, which cuts across police detention facilities and prisons, is the number of deaths recorded as a result of gross medical negligence and the neglect of illness.<\/p>\n

This pattern of death falls within the category of indirect killing, and is characterised by police policy making no distinction between criminal and political detainees. Deaths result from the overlap of two factors: medical negligence, and Egypt’s poor<\/a> detention conditions and facilities, which claim many victims without direct intervention, something law enforcement forces deliberately exploit on a wide scale to obscure responsibility for killing and death in many incidents in the face of victims’ families and others.<\/p>\n

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Negotiating to Contain Deaths<\/h3>\n

Egypt’s deteriorating criminal justice conditions do not offer real opportunities for justice for victims, despite the efforts of their relatives and defence teams. Official treatment differs for each category of victims: in the case of criminal detainees, families and defence teams have greater opportunities to escalate, and the circumstances of criminal detainees’ killings in detention facilities often allow for eyewitnesses to what the victim suffered during and before the killing, whether family members, neighbours or fellow detainees, who take it upon themselves to publicise the killings.<\/p>\n

In areas where tribal and family ties are strong, as in Upper Egypt and the border areas, the victim’s family and social circle pressure security leaders, justice and judicial institutions and their representatives in these areas to open an investigation into the incident, identify the police officer responsible for the killing, and allow the family to receive the victim’s body, if the local police station refuses to hand over the body for fear of escalation.<\/p>\n

In the case of political victims and the forcibly disappeared who were killed on political charges, the opportunities for families and their legal representatives to disclose what happened to their relatives decline sharply. No witnesses to the killings are possible, as the victims were held in enforced disappearance in unknown places. At the same time, the family is summoned to be informed of the death, and goes through bargaining and negotiations with the security agency to have the body released.<\/p>\n

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Death in Egyptian Prisons<\/h3>\n

The majority of recorded deaths in Egyptian prisons fall within what is known as indirect death (death due to illness), which happens in gradual stages, making it difficult to identify the actual killer or determine criminal responsibility, according to the Egyptian Front.<\/p>\n

Testimonies and documentation reveal other considerations related to the prisoner’s classification, leading to a clear and deliberate tendency to ignore the medical condition of the prisoner or detainee. This applies to those held in maximum-security prisons such as the former Scorpion prison and Badr 1, where there is no possibility of communicating with others or calling for help.<\/p>\n

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According to the documentation and testimonies the Egyptian Front’s report was able to collect, many deaths can be attributed to a number of chronic diseases that recur in most of the deaths: hypertension, diabetes, cancerous tumours, which rank second among causes of death inside prisons, and kidney failure. In addition, there are recurring cases of sudden death among prisoners with no recorded medical history, or at relatively young ages by medical standards. Added to that is the administration’s and security’s deliberate disregard of the early signs reported by the patients themselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The danger of medical negligence extends to infectious diseases, which also put the patient and those around him at risk. In recent years, cases of hepatitis C infection have been recorded, with some prisoners likely infected in the absence of basic precautions such as cleanliness and preventing the sharing of personal tools. In some cases this infection led to serious liver disease, and some entered hepatic comas<\/a>, while they continued to be ignored.<\/p>\n

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The “Harvest of Oppression” report issued by the Nadeem Center for 2023 documented the suffering of 106 detainees from deliberate medical negligence; according to their testimonies, they were deprived of treatment, medical tests and necessary surgeries.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the same time, prisons and their administrations tend to distort and circumvent prosecution decisions, meeting the legal requirements of the prosecution’s request without anything actually being done for the patient, in line with prison officials’ wish to punish the patient through his illness. Prisons tend to create this deliberate distinction between examination by a medical specialist and treatment: the prison administration may allow the patient a medical examination to satisfy the prosecution’s demand, but receiving treatment is another matter.<\/p>\n

Although in such cases the prosecution can direct the prison administration to refer the patient to any public hospital to assess the detained patient’s medical condition in detail, many chief prosecutors tend not to use this power, especially in the case of prisoners with a political background, or do so only after contacting the security agency responsible for the political prisoner to ask whether it can be allowed.<\/p>\n

The National Security Agency is the most powerful player in the file of prisoners with a political background, especially in recent years, given the large number of those detained on the basis of political classifications, which some estimates put at between 40,000 and 60,000 prisoners. Although prisoners are distributed across different prisons, the National Security Agency almost entirely determines the treatment a prisoner should receive in detention.<\/p>\n

National Security’s influence extends to all bodies dealing with the prisoner: the prosecution, the prison administration and public hospitals. In maximum-security prisons, a sick prisoner is entirely subject to the National Security Agency, which consequently assumes responsibility for him. The health aspect is ignored in the case of prisoners deemed dangerous according to their security classification, as they are transferred to maximum-security prisons, ignoring legal provisions that require assessing the prisoner’s health to determine whether the prison and its conditions are suitable for him.<\/p>\n

According to a number of testimonies about patients who died while forcibly disappeared by the National Security Agency, or while being interrogated after being placed in prisons, the security agency tends to pressure the sick among them and deny them treatment to force them to confess or provide information. Once they are placed in prisons, the internal prison administration deliberately refrains from taking any action regarding the prisoner without referring to the National Security administration, concerning treatment or medical intervention for each individual case.<\/p>\n

At the same time, in the case of political prisoners who died because of illness and its neglect, security deliberately obstructs families from receiving the body for hours, which some interpret as an attempt to dissuade families from complaining or searching in depth for the causes of their relatives’ deaths, ultimately forcing families to accept any conditions in exchange for burying the victim. In addition, the National Security Agency supervises the official death papers, as the existing cases share a common cause of death, which never goes beyond a sharp circulatory collapse leading to cardiac arrest. Added to that is what some have reported about the deliberate obscuring of information in the death certificates issued, which in some cases amounts to omitting any details about the circumstances and causes of death, or at other times refusing to hand these certificates to the family, eliminating any future legal proof regarding these deaths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Egypt’s deteriorating criminal justice system offers little real redress for victims of deaths in detention, despite efforts by their families and lawyers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":9880,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[390],"tags":[19754,19755,18473,5194,18470,19756,19759,19758,19757,19567],"kateb":[710],"class_list":["post-18534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","tag-deaths-in-custody-egypt","tag-detention-conditions-egypt","tag-egyptian-front-for-human-rights","tag-egyptian-prisons","tag-enforced-disappearance-egypt","tag-medical-negligence-in-prisons","tag-mubarak-and-sisi-eras","tag-nadeem-center","tag-national-security-agency-egypt","tag-torture-in-egypt","kateb-zawia3-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/\u0627\u0644\u0633\u062c\u0646\u060c-\u062a\u0635\u0645\u064a\u0645-\u0623\u062e\u064a\u0631.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18535,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18534\/revisions\/18535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18534"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=18534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}