Introduction

In a TV telephone interview in September 2021, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced the imminent inauguration of a prison complex in Wadi al-Natrun, to be Egypt’s largest and the first of seven or eight similar complexes. He said its inmates would “serve their sentences humanely and decently ... movement, sustenance, healthcare, social and cultural care, and rehabilitation, in a similar system to that of American prisons” and that “no one will be punished twice.”