The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) holds Interior Minister Mahmoud Tawfik fully responsible for the health and safety of political prisoner Mohamed Adel, the former spokesman of the 6 April Movement, who has been cut off from the outside world since announcing his intention to go on hunger strike starting Dec 25th 2024, when the Gamasa prison administration prevented his wife’s visitation. His wife, Rofaida Hamdy, said that she learned on Jan 2nd that he was transferred from the Gamasa maximum security prison in Dakahlia governorate, where his wife and family resides, to the 10th of Ramadan 4 prison in Sharqia governorate, as a punishment for announcing his hunger strike.

On Dec 23rd 2024, Adel was supposed to have his first exam as an associate student of public law diploma at Mansoura University, but the Gamasa prison administration refused to admit the faculty committee in, prohibiting Adel’s exam.

Adel’s family learned that he went on hunger strike on Dec 25th, and that he would turn it gradually into a hunger and water strike, in protest against denying him his right to education, which is guaranteed by the constitution and law. The prison administration prevented Adel from taking the exam again on December 28th, and prevented his wife from visiting him on officially scheduled dates, without giving reasons.

Moving Adel to another prison means that he will be denied family visits and access to personal belongings for 11 days until he gets registered in the new prison, which compounds concerns about his safety and health, which has deteriorated significantly over the past years. 

Adel’s freedom has been restricted over the past eleven years, either by being held in pretrial detention, or being subjected to police surveillance every day for half a day for a period of one and a half years, or by serving unfair prison sentences issued against him on political charges. Over the past six years, Adel has been subjected to double abuse, ranging from prolonged pretrial detention to "recycling" into new cases on similar charges.

In September 2023, Aga Misdemeanor Court of Appeal in Mansoura upheld Adel's four-year prison sentence in Case No. 2981 of 2023, on charges of spreading false news on social media. Although he spent two years and seven months in pretrial detention pending the case, he was notified that his jail term would be counted from the moment the verdict was issued, without counting the years of his pretrial detention. Therefore, Adel is expected to finish serving his jail term in September 2027, instead of February 2025.

EIPR stresses that Adel’s continued detention is a flagrant violation of the law, and that the concerned authorities have a number of legal reasons that make his release obligatory. Firstly, the authorities have to respect Article 482 of the Criminal Procedures Law, which states that the period of custodial penalty shall commence as of the day of the arrest of the person sentenced, not from the day of the issuance of the prison sentence. Secondly, Adel deserves to be released for health reasons under the Prisons Organization Law due to the deterioration of his health condition over the past years. Finally, EIPR backs Adel family’s call on the President of the Republic to issue a presidential pardon for him to end his unjustified suffering.

EIPR further calls on the Public Prosecution to prove Adel's hunger strike, allow his family to visit him immediately, and launch an urgent investigation into the multiple incidents of arbitrariness in which the Gamasa prison administration violated the Egyptian law, by preventing Adel from taking his exams, communicating with his family, or even receiving appropriate medical treatment.