New report documents over 1,700 prisoners ‘rotated’ in remand detention in 4 years

In the last four years, at least 1,764 prisoners were subject to “rotation,” a loophole commonly used by Egyptian authorities to circumvent the legal limits on the duration for which detainees may be held without trial, a new independent report revealed.

The report, issued by the Transparency Center for Research, Documentation and Data Management in partnership with The Arab Foundation for Civil and Political Rights, documents instances of rotation between January 2018 and December 2021, in what one of the report's authors described to Mada Masr as “a human rights violation that is systematically carried out for political aims.”

The authorities normally resort to rotation when a prisoner’s legal remand detention period ends, or they are acquitted or ordered released by a court or by the prosecuting authority. The prosecution then immediately issues orders for the prisoner to be “rotated” back into detention pending a new investigation into similar charges, most commonly, “joining a terrorist group,” according to the report.

In effect, the policy gives authorities a “legal” framework through which to hold prisoners without trial for indefinite periods, but since the practice is not widely known outside of Egypt, the organizations said, rotation is not directly addressed or defined by international conventions.

The report revealed that at least 1,699 men, 32 women and 33 minors were rotated during their imprisonment, adding that the total number of detainees who were subjected to this measure over the past four years could not be ascertained “due to the scarcity of government data and the difficulty of accessing prosecution data,” the co-author said.

Of the 561 prisoners whose occupations could be determined, the report said, a plurality were students, of whom there were 178. Seventy-one engineers were also documented, 62 teachers, 43 lawyers, 28 doctors, 17 journalists, 11 accountants, 10 faculty members, three researchers and three former lawmakers.

Most of the detainees who were subject to rotation faced similar charges across the different investigations for which they were ordered detained. “Joining a terrorist group” was the most common charge, leveled against 928 detainees out of the over 1,700 documented in the report, with other recurring charges usually being linked to terrorism, public protests or publication and press work.

Many detainees also suffered repeated rotation, according to the report, some as many as seven consecutive times, with a total of 2,744 separate instances documented.

Around 64 percent of those who were detained pending new cases following their release or the end of their detention period appeared before the Public Prosecution, which referred about two-thirds of that number to trial. The remaining 36 percent appeared before the Supreme State Security Prosecution, the report added.

The report also touched on the rapid acceleration in the use of rotation over the past four years, reaching its highest rates in 2021, with a total of 1,456 detainees documented in the report to have been rotated, compared to 139 in 2018, 306 in 2019 and 843 in 2020, with rotations peaking in the last quarter of each of the four years.

High-profile court cases that saw multiple instances of the practice include cases connected to the crackdown on the September 2019 demonstrations called for by exiled contractor Mohamed Ali, the 2015 assassination of Public Prosecutor Hesham Barakat and other cases related to the formation of militant groups such as Hassm and Ansar Beit al-Maqdes.