State security detains Ahmed Douma on ‘false news’ charges, questioning him on article criticizing prison system

Activist and writer Ahmed Douma was detained, again, on Monday by the Supreme State Security Prosecution which ordered he be held for four days, defense lawyer Nabih al-Genady told Mada Masr. 

Genady said the prosecution is investigating Douma on charges of “publishing false statements, news, and rumors, inside and outside the country, with the aim of disturbing the public peace and sowing unrest.”

Genady also said the investigations touched on an article penned by Douma and published in the Qatari-owned outlet, The New Arab, under the title, “From the Prison Inside the State to the State Inside the Prison.” 

Genady said the prosecution’s investigations with Douma also touched on the writer’s social media activity. 

In the article, which Douma also published on his own Substack, he wrote about the prison system and the transformation of prisons into “institutions for eradication and neutralization behind closed doors, while outside them [prevails] a mindset of eradicating rule, against those who dissent, oppose, irritate or are different; that is to say against the whole of society.”

“The organization that thinks it is defending its own stability with the fist of securitization,” he continued in the article, “is producing unseen armies of blind hatred.” He concludes that while the streets may be silenced by fear, this is a state of waiting rather than a retreat or surrender.

When prison becomes the sole response of power to an economic crisis or people demanding their rights, wrote Douma, then power “loses all legitimacy [...] except its legitimization of [people’s] hatred [toward it],” and becomes vulnerable to the first “crack in its foundations.”

He warned that this could also mean that when “the explosion” comes it will be a “storm of revenge” rather than a “demand for change,” adding that “work should be done to evade this so that we do not end up recreating the same cycle of oppression even more brutally, out of our desire to break it.”

Douma was released from a prior prison sentence by presidential pardon in August, 2023. He served 10 years imprisonment in relation to clashes between protesters and security forces that took place outside the Cabinet building in Cairo in 2011. 

Since then, he has been summoned by prosecuting authorities on seven separate occasions in relation to his online activity. 

He has been required to pay high bail for his release in several instances, including a LE100,000 fee in January and another of LE10,000 in 2025. 

A group of 10 human rights organizations issued a statement on Monday condemning “the continued pursuit of Douma and his summons for investigation without his having committed any crime delineated in the law.”

The organizations called for Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawky “to drop all charges against him and to close all the cases he is charged in without evidence,” as well as to drop the travel ban which has prohibited him from leaving the country.