Imprisoned graduate student Ahmed Samir goes on hunger strike to protest harsh sentence

Graduate student Ahmed Samir Santawy began a hunger strike last week to protest a four-year prison sentence handed down against him by an emergency court on June 22 on charges of “publishing false news from outside the country about internal affairs,” his family told Mada Masr on Monday.

A family member who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity said that Santawy’s father visited Santawy on Sunday and discovered he had begun a hunger strike on Wednesday after the ruling was issued.

Santawy’s defense team filed a report to the public prosecutor regarding his hunger strike on Sunday, demanding that the prosecution investigate the matter and that the researcher be moved to the prison hospital to ensure his health could be closely monitored, according to a statement by the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression.

The family member told Mada Masr that Santawy’s psychological condition has deteriorated since the verdict and that he rejected his father’s attempts to dissuade him from continuing the hunger strike during the Sunday visit.

The family was expecting a prison sentence of around 18 months at worst, according to the relative, as opposed to four years. Santawy told his father during the visit that he is not a criminal and that he would not accept the verdict. “[Santawy] will not play this game,” the family member told Mada Masr.

Santawy traveled to Egypt on December 23 on vacation from his masters degree at Central European University in Austria. Upon his arrival at Sharm el-Sheikh airport, he was questioned about a thesis he was writing on abortion and Islam. On February 1, he was forcibly disappeared when he presented himself at a National Security Agency office in Cairo’s First Settlement in response to a summons from a security agency that had raided the family home on January 23.  Several days later, he was ordered into remand detention by the State Security Prosecution on charges of terrorism and spreading false news.  

His lawyer Nabih al-Genady told Mada Masr at the time that Santawy told the prosecution that he was hit in the face repeatedly in detention in Cairo’s First Settlement, and that the security officers who were interrogating him asked him about his relationship with Ultras al-Ahlawy (a politically active group of Al-Ahly football club fans) and the Muslim Brotherhood, although Samir confirmed that he did not belong to either of the groups. 

In May, Santawy was added to a different case and referred to trial before the emergency court, where he was convicted and sentenced last week in an unusually speedy trial. “It is outrageous that Ahmed Samir Santawy was sentenced to four years behind bars following a flawed conviction on entirely spurious grounds by a special state security court,” Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director, Philip Luther, said in a statement. Verdicts by the emergency state security court cannot be appealed.

Santawy was also reportedly physically assaulted by officers at Tora Liman Prison days before he was questioned in the second case. Although his defense team demanded investigation into the incident, they did not receive a response from the prosecution on the matter. The Interior Ministry denied the incident at the time.