Inmates Isolated, Beaten, Denied Food and Medicine
Staff at Scorpion Prison beat inmates severely, isolate them in cramped
“discipline” cells, cut off access to families and lawyers, and
interfere with medical treatment, according to the 80-page report, “‘We Are in Tombs’: Abuses in Egypt’s Scorpion Prison.”
The report documents cruel and inhuman treatment by officers of Egypt’s
Interior Ministry that probably amounts to torture in some cases and
violates basic international norms for the treatment of prisoners.
The abuse in Scorpion, where inmates are held in cells without beds
or items for basic hygiene, has persisted with almost no oversight from
prosecutors and other watchdogs, behind a wall of secrecy kept in place
by the Interior Ministry.
“Scorpion Prison sits at the end of the state’s repressive
pipeline, ensuring that political opponents are left with no voice and
no hope,” said Joe Stork,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
“Its purpose seems to be little more than a place to throw government
critics and forget them.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 relatives of inmates held in
Scorpion, two lawyers, and one former prisoner, and reviewed medical
files and photos of sick and deceased prisoners.
Since July 2013, when Egypt’s military, led by then-Defense Minister
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew Mohamed Morsy, the country’s first
freely elected leader and a high-ranking Muslim Brotherhood member, the
Egyptian authorities have engaged in one of the widest arrest campaigns
in the country’s modern history, targeting a broad spectrum of political
opponents.
Relatives said that conditions in Scorpion deteriorated drastically
in March 2015, when al-Sisi, who was elected president in 2014,
appointed Magdy Abd al-Ghaffar as interior minister. Between March and
August 2015, Interior Ministry officials banned all visits by families
and lawyers, essentially cutting off the prison from the outside world.
The ban prevented families from delivering much-needed food and
medicine otherwise unavailable in the prison – where there is no
hospital or regular visits from a doctor – and amounted to what
relatives described as a “starvation” policy that left inmates sick and
gaunt.
Between May and October 2015, at least six Scorpion inmates died in
custody. Three of their families agreed to speak with Human Rights
Watch. Two of the men had been diagnosed with cancer and one with
diabetes. Their relatives said that the authorities prevented the men
from receiving timely treatment or medicine deliveries, refused to
consider conditionally releasing them on medical grounds, and failed to
investigate their deaths.
In one case, Interior Ministry authorities refused to provide Essam Derbala, a high-ranking member of al-Gama`a al-Islamiyya (the
Islamic Group), with his prescription diabetes medicine, despite orders
from a judge and prosecutor, Derbala’s brother and lawyer said.
The
authorities refused even after Derbala appeared at an August 2015 court
hearing shaking, semi-conscious, and unable to control his urination.
Derbala died hours after the hearing.
Another inmate, Farid Ismail, a former member of parliament for the
Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, suffered from Hepatitis C
and died in May 2015, after passing out in a hepatic coma inside the
prison.
Aisha al-Shater, the daughter of Muslim Brotherhood deputy supreme
guide Khairat al-Shater, said that when Ismail failed to answer a daily
roll call devised by her father and others in the cellblock during a
period when they were confined to their cells, they told the guards, who
responded that it was “none of their business.” The next day, guards
discovered Ismail unconscious in his cell. He died in an outside
hospital about a week later.
“Afterward, even calling to each other was prohibited,” Aisha
al-Shater said. “So right now, they say, ‘We are in tombs. We’re living,
but we are in tombs.’”
Since the months-long visit ban in 2015, authorities at Scorpion
have continued to arbitrarily ban inmates from meeting their families or
lawyers for weeks or months. They do not allow inmates to meet
privately with their lawyers at any time. Officers, including some
high-ranking Interior Ministry officials, have beaten and threatened
inmates who went on hunger strike to protest conditions and humiliated
and mistreated prominent prisoners during cell searches.
Between Morsy’s overthrow and May 2014, Egyptian authorities
arrested or charged at least 41,000 people, according to one documented
count, and 26,000 more may have been arrested since the beginning of
2015, lawyers and human rights researchers say. The government has
admitted to making nearly 34,000 arrests.
While detainees at other prisons in Egypt have alleged serious
abuses, Scorpion has emerged, not for the first time in its history, as
the central site for those deemed the most dangerous enemies of the
state.
Constructed in 1993 and officially known as Tora Maximum Security
Prison, Scorpion was intended to hold “preventive detainees in state
security cases,” according to the decree that established the prison.
“It was designed so that those who go in don’t come out again unless
dead,” Major General Ibrahim Abd al-Ghaffar, a former Scorpion warden,
said during a television interview in 2012. “It was designed for
political prisoners.”
The National Security Agency of the Interior Ministry, then known as
State Security Investigations, effectively ran Scorpion with
extrajudicial authority, ignoring scores of court orders to lift
arbitrary bans on access.
Today, little seems to have changed in Scorpion, which holds about
1,000 prisoners, relatives estimate. They include most of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s top leadership, alleged members of the Islamic State
extremist group, and various critics of al-Sisi’s government, including
journalists and doctors.
Egypt’s Interior Ministry should immediately end arbitrary visit
bans, ensure regular access to doctors and medical treatment, and
provide prisoners with minimum necessities for hygiene and comfort. The
Egyptian government should allow international detention monitors to
visit Scorpion, and form an independent national committee with the
authority to make snap visits to prisons and other detention sites and
submit complaints to a special prosecutor.
The Egyptian public prosecution should investigate deaths in custody
and charge those with command responsibility for Scorpion in connection
with any acts of torture and cruel and inhuman treatment.
“Egypt’s detention system is overflowing with critics of the
government,” Stork said. “Ending the abuses at Scorpion is a small step
toward improving dire conditions across the country.”
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