Files: Capital Punishment
18 Aug 2022
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights joins the World Day Against the Death Penalty, which aimed in the past year to focus on women who have been sentenced to death, those who have been executed and women at risk of being sentenced to death. EIPR’s position has been and remains to call for the suspension of the death penalty until a broad societal dialogue is opened about its deterrent effect.
The undersigned human rights organizations condemn the Court of Cassation’s 14 June verdict upholding the death sentence against twelve leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Case no. 2985 of 2015, known as the Rabaa Dispersal Case.
Therefore, the Stop the Death Penalty Campaign in Egypt and the undersigned organizations call upon the Egyptian government to immediately halt the implementation of the death penalty and to abide by the Egyptian Code of Criminal Procedure by informing the families of those sentenced to death of the execution deadline and allowing them to visit the convicted person in accordance with what is stipulated in Egyptian law.
The five groups called on all civil society organizations, political parties, unions, individuals, and Egyptian communities abroad and regional and international bodies to endorse these seven steps as minimum requirements to begin restoring the dignity and rights of all Egyptians.
The Egyptian government carried out death sentences over the previous three days without prior notification to the families of the convicts of the execution date. The families have also not been allowed to see their relatives before the execution, a right enshrined by Article 472 of the Criminal Procedure Law
In the first 2 months of 2021 alone Egyptian authorities executed 7 prisoners.
67 new defendants were sentenced to death
48 new defendants received provisional death penalty sentences.
By the end of October 2020, the justice system in Egypt had carried out the largest number of executions (in different cases of a varying nature) since it began its expansion of the application of death penalty in the last five years. A total of 53 people were executed during the course of October, the last of these executions took place on October 28 when four convicts were executed in a judgement related to the killing of 17 people in a nightclub fire in Agouza.
10 Oct 2020
EIPR engages with the topic through highlighting specific difficulties that have impeded the fulfillment of the right to counsel in a number of cases seen before Egyptian courts, where death sentences have been issued. The case files and investigation papers of these cases were collected and documented by the team between 2017 and 2019.
