Rights groups condemn prosecution’s failure to address complaints of torture in detention

A group of human rights organizations issued a statement on Wednesday condemning the Public Prosecution’s intransigence in investigating allegations of torture and maltreatment inside Egyptian prisons.

The call came after a new testimony emerged this week on the use of electrocution to torture detainees in the Maximum Security Wing 2 of Tora Prison Complex, which renewed long-standing demands to address widespread abuse inside prisons and detention facilities in Egypt.

The testimony came from detained activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, who informed a judge during a March 1 remand detention renewal session that he had heard prisoners being tortured by electrocution from his cell, according to his sister Mona Seif. 

In a video published on social media on Tuesday, Seif said the family had filed an official complaint at the Public Prosecutor’s office, demanding the prosecutor investigate the allegations.

However, on Wednesday, the Interior Ministry issued a statement mentioning Seif by name, denying her allegations and announcing it will take legal measures against what it called the false allegations. 

Eight human rights groups condemned the Public Prosecution in their Wednesday statement for failing to investigate the torture allegations, as well as criticizing the Interior Ministry for denying the claims before they could be investigated.

“The Interior Ministry did not wait for the public prosecutor’s office to react to the official claims made by a citizen regarding allegations of torture made by her brother before a judge or any other claims made by her family and rather rushed to threaten legal action against [the citizen],” said the statement. 

Seif told Mada Masr on Wednesday that this is not the first complaint her family has filed with the prosecution office. Seif said they have filed complaints for over a year with no response or acknowledgment. The only responses, according to Seif, were statements from the Interior Ministry denying the content of the complaints or smear campaigns from some media outlets. 

In the social media video she posted on Tuesday, Seif said that they have filed over 10 complaints regarding different incidents of violations against her brother Abd El Fattah since he was last taken into detention 16 months ago, as well as violations against her sister Sanaa Seif, who was detained in June. 

Abd El Fattah was first sentenced to five years in prison on charges related to a protest outside the Shura Council in 2013. He was released in 2019 after completing his sentence but was subject to an additional five years of probation, during which he was required to turn himself into the Dokki Police Station for 12 hours each night. However, National Security Agency officers arrested him from the station in September 2019 amid a security crackdown spurred by protests against alleged government corruption, and he has been held in remand detention since.

Shortly after his rearrest, Abd El Fattah’s family issued a statement asserting that upon his arrival to the Tora Prison Complex, he was blindfolded, beaten and humiliated. “He was slapped and kicked as he passed the prison door, was told to strip to his underwear, then forced to walk down a corridor of people as he was beaten on his back and his neck. This is known as the ‘welcome parade’ and is a routine abuse in Egypt’s prisons. It lasted 15 minutes,” the statement read.

Other detainees have complained of poor conditions in remand detention and of routine abuse on the part of prison staff at the beginning of this month. 

New claims this month come against what the UN Committee Against Torture described as a “systemic practice” of human rights abuses in Egypt’s detention facilities in a 2017 report presented to the UN General Assembly.

The report, based on a five-year investigation, stated that “torture is carried out by Egyptian military, police, and prison officials for the purposes of punishing protesters and, since 2013, members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to coerce confessions and pressure detainees to implicate others in crimes.”

The committee added that “impunity for torture was widespread and was facilitated by the absence of an independent investigating authority for complaints of torture, the excessive use of military courts, a lack of regular independent monitoring of places of detention, and the inadequate independence and competence of the National Council for Human Rights.”

The report noted that torture often follows arbitrary arrests, accusing public prosecutors, judges, and prison officials of facilitating human rights abuses due to their failure to curb “practices of torture, arbitrary detention, and ill-treatment, or [acting] on complaints.”

Though the government welcomed some of the committee’s recommendations at the time it refused to implement others, including the proposed end to solitary confinement; establishment of an independent body to investigate claims of torture, forced disappearances and maltreatment; the limitation of military trials to non-civilian cases; and the abolition of virginity and anal tests on prisoners.

The Wednesday statement was signed by Al-Nadim Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, the Arab Foundation for Freedom of Thought and Expression, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, the Freedom Initiative and the Geneva-based Committee for Justice.