Egypt: Prisoners offered amnesty in exchange for PR appearance, says report

Dozens of prisoners in Egypt have reportedly been offered amnesty in exchange for participating in a scripted conference with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi planned in Tora prison next month, a local independent publication reported on Sunday. According to Mada Masr, three lawyers representing detainees in the Tora, Minya and Wadi al-Natrun prisons had been informed by their clients that officials from Egypt’s National Security Agency had reached out to hundreds of prisoners, offering early release should they agree to speak about incarceration conditions in a favourable light during the conference. Dozens of prisoners have reportedly been transferred from Minya and Wadi al-Natrun to Tora ahead of the conference planned for early October. Those allegedly scheduled to receive amnesty reportedly include Islamists and other political prisoners - amid longstanding accusations of a crackdown on political opposition under Sisi. A government source also told Mada Masr that a number of amnesties were expected around 18 October, which marks Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. A number of prisoners had previously been released this summer ahead of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Middle East Eye could not independently verify the report. Egypt: Prisoners at risk of scabies due to poor incarceration conditions Read More » The president denied on Wednesday that the country had any political prisoners, adding: “There are no forms of human rights violations in Egypt.” Sisi said last week that he was poised to launch “a full American-style” prison that will be followed by "seven or eight" other similar projects across the country. The new project will take the number of prisons in Egypt to 79. More than a third of them - 27 in total - have been built under Sisi, who became president in 2014 after a military coup toppled his democratically elected predecessor Mohamed Morsi a year earlier. Rights groups have accused his government of jailing some 60,000 activists and political opponents under the pretext of fighting terrorism. In March, a UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) statement decried Egypt's stifling of dissent, in a country considered the world's third-worst jailer of journalists behind China and Turkey. This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

George Soros at the Davos Forum

Dear Friends and Colleagues,   I thought you would be interested in reading George's remarks he delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this evening.   Best regards, Michael Vachon   George Soros Remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland January 25, 2018 The current moment in history Good evening. It has become something of an annual Davos tradition for me to give an overview of the current state of the world. I was planning half an hour for my remarks and half an hour for questions, but my speech has turned out to be closer to an hour. I attribute this to the severity of the problems confronting us. After I’ve finished, I’ll open it up for your comments and questions. So prepare yourselves. *** I find the current moment in history rather painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Trump would
Read more

Defining the Biden Doctrine

  In his first major foreign-policy speech as U.S. president, Joe Biden declared to the world that America was back. The international sigh of relief was almost audible amid hopes that former President Donald Trump’s disruptive style was a relic. Biden has pursued an ambitious agenda to repair alliances and forge new ones, curb corruption, arrest democratic backsliding, and tackle climate change, all while managing the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian threats to Ukraine, and escalating tensions with China.  It hasn’t all been plain sailing. The decision to withdraw remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of the country’s government and chaos in Kabul as hundreds of thousands of people fled the Taliban. Plans to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia, at the expense of Canberra’s submarine deal with Paris, soured trans-Atlantic relations.  Ahead of the anniversary of Biden’s inauguration,  Foreign Policy ’s Amy Mackinnon spoke with one of t
Read more