On Saturday, February 26, 2022, the Administrative Court rejected the lawsuit filed by EIPR against the Minister of Interior and the Head of the Prisons Authority, for their failure to conditionally release prisoner, Mohamed Mohamed Naguib Ibrahim, who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, despite having served half the sentence.

EIPR filed the lawsuit on July 8, 2021 before the State Council, registered under No. 58093 for the year 75 J. EIPR urgently demanded a conditional release of Ibrahim - who was sentenced on 10/10/2013 to fifteen years in prison - for having served half his sentence. The lawsuit, which was filed in the name of Ibrahim’s wife, demanded to stop the case and refer it to the Supreme Constitutional Court, or to authorize the establishment of a constitutional lawsuit with the unconstitutionality of the text of Article 52 bis of the Prison Organization Law No. 396 of 1956 added to Law No. 19 of 2020 issued and published in the Official Gazette on 18/3/2020.

Ibrahim's wife had filed a complaint number 1987780 demanding the conditional release of her husband, which was registered on the electronic portal of the Council of Ministers. The response came to her that her husband, Muhammad Muhammad Najib Ibrahim, deserves to be offered a police release within the month of April 2021. His file was sent to the Prisons Authority on March 17, 2021, but he was not released. Subsequently, EIPR on behalf of the wife, alerted the Minister of the Interior and the Head of the Prisons Authority of the necessity of the conditional release of Ibrahim because he had served more than half of his sentence. Since they did not comply, she filed the aforementioned lawsuit.

EIPR’s lawsuit affirmed that the citizens' right to equality before the law constitutes a basis for justice, freedom and social peace. It is a means of establishing the legal protection of constitutional and legal rights, one of which is the right of convicts to conditional release. The conditional release procedure consists of releasing the convicts before the specified period for the expiry of the sentence, while subjecting them to supervision during a subsequent period. It is an idea that arose to rehabilitate the convict for social life, as the punitive policy is no longer limited to deterrence nor the community’s entitlement towards the perpetrator of the illegal act to receive a corporal punishment. Rather, it extends its goal to rehabilitating and reforming the convict.

The Prisons Law defines the conditions for conditional release, which entails that the convict must have served half his sentence and has fulfilled his financial obligations, if he or she is able to do so; and that the convict be of good behavior inside the penal institution.

EIPR’s lawsuit also added that excluding a prisoner from a conditional release is a violation of the principle of equality, which the state guarantees to all citizens and is sanctioned by the Egyptian constitution. The lawsuit also considered that the text of Article 52 bis of Law No. 396 of 1956 added to Law No. 19 of 2020 issued and published in the Official Gazette on March 18, 2020 is unconstitutional for violating the principle of equality.