Held 21 Months Without Trial Despite Serious Illness
August 14, 2017
Egyptian
authorities should immediately provide appropriate health care to the
imprisoned journalist Hisham Gaafar, whose health, including his
eyesight, is deteriorating in detention, Human Rights Watch said today.
If prison authorities are unable to provide him necessary health care,
they should allow him to seek care in private health facilities.
The Interior Ministry’s National Security Agency arrested Gaafar,
director of the Mada Foundation for Media Development, a private media
company, at his office in October 2015. Prosecutors have ordered Gaafar
detained pending investigation on charges that include membership in the
Muslim Brotherhood and illegally receiving foreign funds for his
foundation, his lawyers told Human Rights Watch.
“Egypt’s Interior Ministry has shown contempt for Hisham Gaafar’s health and well-being,” said Sarah Leah Whitson,
Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The fact that the Interior
Ministry refuses to provide him his rightful care is a sad testament to
Egyptian authorities’ disregard for detainees’ most basic rights.”
Gaafar, 53, has an eye condition – optic nerve atrophy – that
requires ongoing specialist care or he may risk losing his sight
altogether. He also suffers from a years-long prostate enlargement
condition and risks complications if he does not receive the proper
treatment. His eyesight is deteriorating and his health has worsened
during his time in detention, in poor conditions, his family said.
Immediately following his arrest, police took Gaafar to his home,
where officers seized his personal publications, work papers, computers,
and phones, including those belonging to his wife and children. They
detained his family inside the home for 17 hours. Security officers
confiscated all his medical documents and reports and have not returned
them to his family, despite their requests.
National Security officers then took Gaafar to an undisclosed
location and held him for two days without access to his family or
lawyers. His family heard of his whereabouts when a lawyer saw him by
coincidence in the Supreme State Security Prosecution office in Cairo.
Prosecutors have kept him in pretrial detention since then.
Under Egyptian law, prosecutors have broad power to hold those
suspected of committing major offenses, including political and national
security crimes, in pretrial detention for up to five months without
regular judicial review, and judges can extend the detention for up to
two years without requiring any substantive justification from
prosecutors.
A judge should immediately review the necessity and legality of
Gaafar’s detention and either send him to trial without further delays
or release him, Human Rights Watch said.
During Gaafar’s time in detention, most of it spent in the maximum security Scorpion Prison in Cairo,
the Interior Ministry’s Prisons Authority has not provided needed
medicine but has intermittently allowed Gaafar to receive the eye
vitamins and prostate medicine he required, after completely banning
such supplies for the first two months of his detention. During those
two months, his wife, Manar, told Human Right Watch, prison authorities
kept Gaafar alone in a cell that, in his words, resembled a “tomb”
without sunlight.
Later, they allowed his family very short and irregular visits, with
no chance to verify whether he had received the medicine they had given
to prison guards for him. Since March 2017, prison authorities have
again denied him visits from relatives and his lawyer.
Before he was detained, Gaafar used special optic tools to read and
glasses for everyday life. He also needed some assistance in his daily
routine, his wife said. Prison authorities allowed his wife to deliver
the glasses several months after his detention, but when they reached
him, they were broken.
The way the glasses were broken suggested it had
been deliberate, his wife said. She delivered new ones, but he has not
had a new eye examination. His wife said that he recently told her he
was not seeing as well as before, even with the glasses, suggesting his
eyesight may have deteriorated.
Gaafar has had optic nerve atrophy in both eyes since he was a
teenager, according to his wife.
Medical documents and reports from
2012, which she provided to Human Rights Watch after she retrieved them
from a hospital, stated that at the time he had only 10 percent of his
vision remaining in his left eye. Optic nerve atrophy has no cure, but
it can be slowed by exposure to sunlight, medicine, and a healthy diet,
his wife said doctors had told them. These are not available in adequate
amounts to inmates at Scorpion Prison and many other Egyptian detention
facilities.
A Human Rights Watch report on Scorpion Prison,
published in 2016, documented cruel and inhuman treatment by officers
of the Interior Ministry’s Prisons Authority that probably amounted to
torture, including preventing food and medicine deliveries and other
interference in medical care that may have contributed to prisoners’
deaths.
Gaafar’s wife said he appeared weak and to have lost significant
weight during her March 2017 visit. She said she saw bite marks all over
his body, which he said were from insects that had infested his cell
due to a sewage leak. He told her he had suffered pain for weeks because
he was sleeping on the concrete floor without a mattress. Human Rights
Watch previously documented that Scorpion Prison authorities deny
inmates a wide variety of basic necessities for hygiene and comfort,
including beds, pillows, and mattresses.
In late February 2016, after a public outcry and growing criticism
from the Journalists’ Syndicate, human rights organizations, and public
figures, the authorities transferred Gaafar to the Tora Prison Hospital
after he began suffering from urinary retention – the inability to
fully empty his bladder.
Prison authorities then transferred him to
al-Manial University Hospital, which is affiliated with Cairo
University. Doctors who examined him there on March 4, and again on
March 10, 2016, asked prison officials to allow him to be kept at Cairo
University hospitals to prepare for more tests, including diagnostic
surgery on his enlarged prostate, the apparent cause of the urinary
retention.
Gaafar spent five months at the prisoners’ ward at Qasr al-Aini
Hospital, where ill inmates who are hospitalized are usually held, but
the authorities repeatedly failed to give Gaafar timely permission to go
for needed tests. Human Rights Watch has previously documented that prison authorities pressure hospitals not to admit inmates or to return them without necessary treatment.
Gaafar told his wife that he received very little medical care
there. In August 2016, the authorities sent Gaafar back to Scorpion
Prison before he had undergone the examinations that he was told he
needed. Prison authorities and Cairo University hospitals have not
allowed Gaafar’s family to read or obtain a copy of the medical reports
issued during his detention, his wife said.
The family managed to obtain the hospital discharge report through
unofficial means, however, and provided a copy to Human Rights Watch.
The report contained no detailed information on any tests Gaafar may
have undergone or treatment received but stated that he suffers from
“mild prostate enlargement" and that "the patient needed no surgical
intervention.” The report did not state what caused the enlargement or
whether it was benign or cancerous – a primary concern for the family.
A couple of days after returning to prison, Gaafar found blood in
his urine, and officers transferred him again to Tora Prison Hospital.
But the facilities there lack a urology specialist, his wife said, and
the prison authorities have refused to arrange for Gaafar to be seen by
one. He appeared before a court in August 2016 carrying a urinary
catheter, his lawyers said.
His wife said that after filing several complaints, a National
Security officer visited Gaafar in detention in November 2016, and told
him, “don’t worry, we will treat you.” But Gaafar’s request to seek
treatment in a private health facility was ignored.
One of his lawyers and his wife both told Human Rights Watch that
prosecutors never allowed them to obtain a copy of the official charges
against him or the rest of his case file. However, Hossam al-Sayed,
another Mada Foundation journalist who was arrested with Gaafar on the
same day, was released without bail in March 2016, said the lawyer Karim
Abd al-Rady of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (an
independent rights group).
Under an amendment to the penal code decreed by President Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi in September 2014, Gaafar could face a 25-year sentence
if convicted of receiving foreign funds illegally.
Prisoners have the right to the highest attainable standard of
physical and mental health guaranteed in the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Egypt ratified in 1982.
The Committee Against Torture, the monitoring body of the Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment – ratified by Egypt in 1986 – has found that failure to
provide adequate medical care can violate the treaty’s prohibition of
cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
“It is deeply concerning that Egypt’s judiciary has become complicit
in human rights violations by cruelly detaining people like Gaafar for
years without justification, exposing them to serious abuse and harm,”
Whitson said.
Cholera is believed to have affected more than 500,000 people and
killed nearly 2,000 since late April, the World Health Organization said
Monday.
A full 503,484 suspected cases and 1,975 deaths are attributable to
the outbreak that erupted last than four months ago in the war-ravaged
country, a WHO overview showed.
The UN health agency said the speed at which the deadly waterborne
disease was spreading had slowed significantly since early July, but
warned that it was still affecting an estimated 5,000 people each day.
The collapse of Yemen's infrastructure after more than two years of
war between the Saudi-backed government and Shiite rebels who control
the capital Sanaa has allowed the country's cholera epidemic to swell to
the largest in the world.
WHO warned that the disease had spread rapidly due to deteriorating
hygiene and sanitation conditions, with millions of people cut off from
clean water across the country.
"Yemen's health workers are operating in impossible conditions," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
"Thousands of people are sick, but there are not enough hospitals,
not enough medicines, not enough clean water," he said, also lamenting
that many of the doctors and nurses needed to rein in the outbreak had
not been paid for nearly a year.
"They must be paid their wages so that they can continue to save lives," he said.
WHO said that it and its partners were "working around the clock" to
support the national efforts to halt the outbreak, adding that more than
99 percent of people who contract cholera in Yemen can survive if they
can access health services.
More than 15 million people in the country have no access to basic healthcare.
Tedros called on all sides in Yemen's conflict, which has killed more
than 8,300 people since March 2015, to urgently seek a political
solution.
"The people of Yemen cannot bear it much longer - they need peace to rebuild their lives and their country," he said.
Tunisian fishermen have prevented a
ship carrying European far-right activists from docking, dealing a blow
to their mission to disrupt the flow of migrant boats from Africa to
Europe.
The C-Star, chartered by French-based group Génération identitaire (GI), was unable to berth in Zarzis.
GI says non-governmental organisations active in the Mediterranean collude with people traffickers.
But the Zarzis fishermen said the anti-migrant activists were racists.
They vowed not to let the C-Star refuel if it landed and the vessel is now expected to try another Tunisian port on Monday.
"It is the least we can do given what is happening out in the
Mediterranean," Chamseddine Bourassine, head of the local fishermen's
organisation, told AFP news agency. "Muslims and Africans are dying."
A port official who asked to remain anonymous said: "Us let in racists here? Never."
Meanwhile humanitarian groups say any attempt to turn migrant boats
back to Libya could be very dangerous and illegal under international
law.
About 600,000 migrants have been rescued from traffickers' boats and taken to Italy since the beginning of 2014.
More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean over the same period.
Earlier this month rights group Amnesty International accused the EU of mostly leaving it up to sea rescue charities to save migrants.
At
the same time, NGOs have come under criticism from the Italian
authorities, who have threatened to stop vessels of other countries
from bringing migrants to Italian ports.
Egyptian
authorities say police have fired tear gas to disperse a rock-pelting
crowd of residents on a River Nile island in Cairo, clashes that left
one person killed and 50 others injured.
CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian police on Sunday fired tear gas to
disperse a rock-pelting crowd of residents defending their homes on a
Nile River island against bulldozers sent by the government to demolish
their illegally-built dwellings. The clashes left one person dead and 50
others injured.
The violence on the island of el-Waraq on the southern
fringes of Cairo is likely to stain a nationwide campaign launched this
summer by Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Egypt's general-turned-president, to
restore government control over state-owned land.
El-Sissi has vowed in televised comments to show no
lenience to anyone taking illegal advantage of state-owned property,
saying the law would prevail regardless of how powerful or wealthy the
offenders were. Anyone using land that does not rightfully belong to
them, he angrily said, is a "common thief."
Illegal use of state land is widespread in Egypt, as well
as building on agrarian land in violation of the law. Since el-Sissi
launched his campaign earlier in the summer, local media has been
showing images of police and army troops demolishing buildings illegally
built or operating without a license, attempting to project an image of
a government keen on protecting what is being billed as "people's
property."
To el-Waraq's middle class and poor residents, however,
the sight of bulldozers coming to demolish their homes may have been
more than they could bear at a time when they, like most Egyptians, are
struggling to cope with soaring prices for food and services, a result
of ambitious reforms introduced by el-Sissi's government to revive the
country's battered economy.
"Get lost! Get lost!" the protesters shouted at the
scores of policemen who descended on the island early Sunday, backed by
bulldozers, scores of riot policemen and led by senior police generals.
The protesters, mostly young males, succeeded in forcing the bulldozers
to turn away, but clashes soon began.
The Health Ministry said a resident died and another 19
were wounded in the clashes. It did not say how the man, Sayed
el-Tafshan, died, but a photo of his body posted on social media
networks showed chest wounds compatible with birdshot.
The Interior Ministry, which controls the police, said its forces only used tear gas.
A ministry statement said a total of 31 people —
policemen as well as contractors who arrived with them on the island —
were injured in the clashes. The injured policemen included two
generals.
Ten residents were arrested for their part in the violence, it added.
Video clips posted on social media networks showed
hundreds of angry islanders, mostly young men, at the man's funeral,
marching through farm fields while chanting "We will sacrifice the
martyr with our soul and blood."
The statement said the residents attacked police with
firearms, birdshot guns and rocks, and that police responded with tear
gas. It said up to 700 building and land violations were recorded on the
island. It acknowledged the death of one islander and that 19 others
were injured.
In el-Waraq, a mostly agricultural island with shoddily
built apartment blocks, residents maintain that their homes are legal,
citing the government's supply of drinking water and electricity.
One of the Nile's largest islands in Egypt, it is home to nearly 200,000 people and is linked to the mainland by six ferries.
"How is my home illegal when you have for years provided
me with water and electricity," said resident and civil servant Mahmoud
Essawi. "It's our land and we are not leaving."
In a separate development, Egypt's military said its jet
fighters destroyed 15 all-terrain vehicles carrying weapons and
explosives along with "criminal elements" after they were detected
getting ready to cross the Libyan border into Egypt.
A military statement Sunday said the warplanes monitored
and "dealt" with the vehicles over the past 24 hours, but it did not say
whether the airstrikes targeted them while on Egyptian soil. It also
did not mention Libya by name, making only a thinly veiled reference to
the North African nation.
Officials in Egypt continue to detain and send ethnic Uyghur students to China.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports the students were studying at Al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo.
RFA and VOA are each part of the United States government-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic group in China and Central Asia.
Most live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China.
RFA reported in May that Chinese officials had begun ordering Uyghurs studying outside of China to return to their hometowns.
A Uyghur student at Al-Azhar told RFA at the time that classmates who had returned to China seem to have disappeared.
“We haven’t been able to contact any of them,” the student said.
More than 200 Uyghurs, many of them religious students, have been
detained in Egypt since July 4. Some were seized in restaurants or at
their homes. Others were stopped at airports while trying to flee to
safer countries, sources told RFA.
The Middle East Monitor reported that as many as 80 Uyghur students may have been seized on Wednesday. They were arrested for alleged problems with their Egyptian residency papers, the Monitor said in its report.
Criticism of China's treatment of Uyghurs
Human rights and Uyghur exile groups have condemned China for
violating the rights of the Uyghurs and for breaking a United Nations
treaty.
The agreement bars forced repatriations.
Sandra Jolley is with the United States Commission on International
Religious Freedoms. She told RFA that the Egyptian government’s actions
violate international rules against torture.
Such rules protect people who may face “imprisonment, torture and death should they be deported to their homes,” Jolley said.
She and others are urging the Grand Imam at Cairo’s Al-Azhar Islamic
University to help stop the forced repatriations of Uyghurs.
Dr. Ahmed El-Tayeb currently serves as the school’s Grand Imam.
“He has a powerful voice. He leads Al-Azhar, and he should accept some role in protecting the students who attend this very prestigious university,” Jolley said.
Call for protection
A group of Uyghur students living in Cairo have also appealed to
El-Tayeb. In a letter, they asked him to prevent future deportations.
“Our only sin is that we want to learn and study religion,” the students said.
The Arabic-language news service HuffPost Arabi received a copy of the letter.
Last week, Al-Azhar said in a statement that no Uyghur students had been
arrested on the university’s grounds or while in any buildings
connected with the school.
The list of blocked websites in Egypt keeps growing, as the
government widens what some say is an unprecedented crackdown on both
local and international digital outlets. So far, 114 websites have been blocked
in the north African nation since May 24, according to the latest
figures from the non-governmental organization Association for Freedom
of Thought and Expression.
A majority of these are news websites, but also included are
platforms that can be used to access blocked sites or that allow for
anonymous browsing and communication.
The affected websites include sites like Mada Masr, the financial newspaper Al Borsa,
and Huffington Post Arabic. Twelve websites linked to Al Jazeera were
also been blocked. Medium, the online publishing platform, was also
banned.
The outage also affected
Tor, the free software that provides users with online anonymity, and
Tor bridges, which helps users circumvent the blocking of Tor itself.
The website of the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an
international network that monitors internship censorship and
surveillance, was also blocked.
The growing censorship comes as the government says it’s cracking down on websites that are “publishing false information” and “supporting terrorism.”
(Link in Arabic) Egypt is currently in the midst of a three-month state
emergency, following twin attacks on churches that killed almost 50
people in April.
The country is also part of a Saudi-led coalition that has put a blockade on Qatar, demanding, among other things,
the closure of the Doha-based Al Jazeera media network which it
considers to a be a propaganda tool for Islamists. The government of
president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is also embroiled in a maritime
demarcation agreement over its decision to vote on the transfer of two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia—a move that has angered many Egyptians.
However, journalists and activists say the campaign is suppressing
free expression and voices critical of the government. Some are accusing
the regime of failing to disclose any judicial or administrative decision to block the sites—or whether emergency law provisions were applied.
“Even in the darkest days of the repressive Mubarak era, the
authorities didn’t cut off access to all independent news sites,” Najia
Bounaim, Amnesty International’s north Africa campaigns director, said.
In a June 19 report, OONI stated that deep packet inspection technology was being used to monitor and block these websites. Mada Masr, one of the blocked sites, also reported
that the decision to block the sites was carried through a “centralized
decision” by the government rather than by the country’s telecoms or
internet service providers.
Since going offline, sites like Mada have been publishing articles on
Facebook. Lina Attallah, the editor of the site, said the strategy of
blocking the sites works to the government’s advantage for now.
“If they
did something more grave like arresting team members or me it would
make big noise, whereas blocking the website is the best way to paralyze
us without paying a high price for it,” Attallah told Reuters.
*Photo by Mohamed Abd El Ghany, courtesy of Reuters
