We ask the Public Prosecutor to release Patrick George Zaki immediately, and the investigative authorities to close the investigation and dismiss the case, for we do not see any basis for criminal prosecution.
Programs: Criminal Justice
EIPR demands the immediate release of Patrick George Zaki without pressing charges, and calls for an investigation into his torture and ill-treatment.
The application for leave to appeal was registered on 12 February 2020 under the no. 1372, and on Thursday 13 the prosecution accepted the application and set a hearing session on February 15 to look into the appeal itself.
The first of these papers, published today in Arabic (translation forthcoming), documents the most egregious and disproportionate of these measures which has become a routine practice (in particular circumstances) for the police: forced searches of personal mobile phones during arbitrary stop and search operations. This measure has no legal basis at all in Egyptian law, not even in the context of declared emergency. The paper provides a brief narrative of how this practice has evolved from October 2019 and until the end of January 2020.
13 Feb 2020
what happened between 20 September and late October 2019 was an unprecedented development as far as police practice in Egypt and in terms of the magnitude of violation of citizens’ privacy. It seems to have been occasioned by the temporary spread of the videos and live feeds of contractor and actor Mohammed Ali before the demonstrations of 20 September.
On Tuesday, December 3, the al-Waily Criminal Court sentenced officer Nader Nabil Bolous Shenouda and eight lower ranking policemen (sub-officers) to three years in prison in criminal case no. 4126/2016.
It is worth noting that the State Security Prosecution has recently developed a habit of throwing a lot of people who are mainly targeted because of their political inclinations into large cauldron cases with a long list of accusations and a huge number of defendants; defendants who do not necessarily have any links or anything in common, and on charges of incidents that are not only unrelated but that do not even have any intersection time or area wise.
We stress on that the source of this serious issue is the absence of a legislation that activates the constitutional article, without disruption to the rest of the constitutional articles that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and guarantee freedom of belief for all without discrimination, as well as the vagueness of the current legal system which opens the door to a such serious violation.
EIPR expresses extreme shock at the death of former president Mohamed Morsi as a result of the failure of Egyptian authorities to provide him necessary medical treatment. The wilful failure to provide adequate health care amounts to murder by neglect, according to the Egyptian penal code as well as international human rights standards.
The second annual report on the death penalty in Egypt, covering the period from January to December 2018.The report reviews and documents death sentences issued in Egypt throughout 2018 and attempts to analyze patterns of handing down death sentences verdicts by Egyptian courts, tracking quantitative and qualitative shifts in the application of the death penalty—the maximum penalty in criminal law and the only irreversible penalty.
