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
Tags: Stop the execution
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms condemn the sudden decision on Wednesday morning, February, to carry out the death sentence against nine people convicted for the assassination of the public prosecutor in case no. 81/2016/High State Security felonies.
The report is divided into two chapters: the first includes factual information on some cases in which death sentences were handed out and upheld during 2017; the second identifies patterns of human rights violations which some of the defendants sentenced to the death in praesentia faced in the course of trial proceedings.
The signatories condemn all violations of the rights of the defense, and the defendants' right to a fair trial, as stipulated in article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The forced disappearance of the defendants contravenes article 40 of Egypt’s Penal Code, which stipulates that, “No one shall be arrested or imprisoned except by an order of the competent authorities, and shall be treated in a manner that protects human dignity and may not be harmed physically or morally.”
EIPR reasserts that the increasing use of death sentences by the Egyptian state as a form of punishment in cases of terrorism or cases labeled as ‘political,’ following trials that do not meet the standards of a fair trial, is far from being a seemingly efficient method of facing violence.
