BFF-42 Amnesty warns of Egypt’s ‘parallel justice system’

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Amnesty warns of Egypt’s ‘parallel justice system’

PARIS, Nov 27, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Amnesty International warned on Wednesday
that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government had built a
“parallel justice system” to crack down on critics and dissent.

The London-based rights watchdog said the key tools of repression were the
Supreme State Security Prosecution service, known as the SSSP, as well as
counter-terrorism courts and special police forces.

“In Sisi’s Egypt, all critics of the government are seen as potential
terrorists,” Amnesty’s France director Katia Roux said at the launch of the
60-page report in Paris.

“The situation is getting worse. Repression is hardening.”

In its report entitled “Permanent State of Exception”, Amnesty said it had
observed a sharp rise in cases prosecuted by the SSSP — from 529 in 2013 to
1,739 cases last year.

The prosecution — which deals with activities deemed threats to state
security — regularly probes political dissidents and Islamist figures
including from the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group.

Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East research and advocacy head, warned
that the SSSP had “become a central tool of repression whose primary goal
appears to be arbitrarily detaining and intimidating critics, all in the name
of counter-terrorism”.

The SSSP, along with the Egyptian National Security Agency (NSA), a special
police force, and the counter-terrorism courts “have emerged as a parallel
justice system for detaining, interrogating and trying peaceful dissidents,”
he said.

– ‘In the fridge’ –

The report noted that many detainees are forced to languish in prison for
lengthy stretches of “pre-trial detention”, without any hope of a legal
reprieve or of a case being opened.

“Many are detained for months and years without evidence, based on secret
police investigations and without recourse to an effective remedy,” it said.

Former inmates of Egyptian prisons and their relatives spoke about their
experiences to AFP in Paris.

“There’s now an expression in Egypt for preventive detention,” said Celine
Lebrun, whose activist Egyptian husband Ramy Shaath has been held in Cairo
since July.

“They say ‘putting someone in the fridge’. The state can put people in the
fridge for months on end or for years.”

She said Shaath, accused of “assisting a terrorist group”, had finally
appeared in court on Monday without his lawyers being given any advance
notice.

Ayman Salah, another activist who has sought asylum in France, said he had
been detained nine times since 2000 on similar charges.

“The conditions of detention in Egypt… Try to reach into the depths of
your imagination, you still won’t have an idea of what it’s like,” he said.

He said detainees were gripped by a fear of being “wiped off” the face of
the earth. “If you are the victim of a forced disappearance, it’s as if you
don’t exist.”

– State of emergency –

Rights groups regularly accuse Egyptian authorities of curtailing freedoms
and muzzling any form of dissent including from Islamist and secular
opposition.

Under Sisi, protests have effectively been outlawed, a renewable state of
emergency remains in force, and authorities last year also adopted a law to
clamp down on social media.

Late Tuesday, lawyers and activists reported on Facebook the arrest of
three journalists from a cafe in Giza, in the latest episode of an ongoing
crackdown on the media.

Authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.

Earlier this week, plainclothes police raided, detained then released three
editors at the local online news outlet Mada Masr after arresting another
editor the day before.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged Egypt to respect press freedom.

“As part of our long-standing strategic relationship with Egypt, we
continue to raise the fundamental importance of respect for human rights,
universal freedoms and the need for a robust civil society,” he said.

“We call on the Egyptian government to respect freedom of the press and
release journalists detained during a raid last weekend.”

BSS/AFP/RY/1818 hrs