Activist Ahmed Douma banned from travel

Poet and political activist Ahmed Douma told Mada Masr that Cairo International Airport authorities prevented him early Sunday from traveling to Beirut — a trip he described as an attempt to “break the state of limbo my life has been in due to ongoing security harassment” since his 2023 release.

After completing all required travel procedures, a passport control officer asked Douma to accompany him to the passports administration office, where he waited three hours before being told to consult the public prosecutor’s office about a decision barring him from travel — one Douma said he plans to appeal within two days.

Over the past ten months, the Supreme State Security Prosecution summoned Douma four times — most recently in September — for investigations into charges of spreading false news related to his writings about detainees and torture, he said.

Douma also faces a contempt of religion charge linked to his poetry collection Curly, which the Public Prosecutor referred to Al-Azhar in 2024. Douma emphasized that neither he nor his defense team had been informed of any travel ban during any of these proceedings.

Douma was released in August 2023 under a presidential pardon after serving ten years of a 15-year hard labor sentence in the 2011 Cabinet clashes case.

Since his release, Douma said that he has been unable to obtain official ID documents, including a passport, which he only managed to secure three days before the airport incident on Sunday.

For each of the four questioning summons, the prosecution ordered Douma’s release on bail, with total bail payments reaching around LE130,000, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.