INSIDE THE NOTORIOUS TORAH PRISON OF EGYPT“
THE EDITORIAL AND POLICY BOARD OF THE
E.N.M.PAEDIA EXPRESS MULTIMEDIA GROUP OF LAGOS,NIGERIA PUBLISHES VERBATIM A
2016 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH TRANSCRIPTS OF THE ROT IN EGYPTIAN PRISON:TORA,EXCERPTS…
It was designed so that those who go in don’t
come out again unless dead. It was designed for political prisoners.”
–Ibrahim Abd al-Ghaffar, former warden, during
a television interview in 2012
Since July 2013, when Egypt’s military, led by
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 a widespread campaign of arrests targeting
a broad spectrum of political opponents.
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
itself has admitted to making nearly 34,000 arrests.
Authorities at a maximum security prison in Cairo that holds
many political prisoners routinely abuse inmates in ways that may have
contributed to some of their deaths. 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.
This influx of detainees strained Egypt’s
detention system. According to the semi-official National Council for Human
Rights, prisons operated at 150 percent of their capacity in 2015. Over the two
years that followed Morsy’s fall, the Egyptian government built or made plans
to build eight new prisons.
One was readymade. Built in 1993 and
officially named Tora Maximum Security Prison, its reputation had long ago
earned it a different moniker: the Scorpion.
This report, based on 23 interviews with
relatives of inmates, lawyers, and a former prisoner, documents abusive
conditions in Scorpion. Authorities there have banned inmates from contacting
their families or lawyers for months at a time, held them in degrading
conditions without beds, mattresses, or basic hygienic items, humiliated,
beaten, and confined them for weeks in cramped “discipline” cells – treatment
that probably amounted to torture in some cases – and interfered with their
medical care in ways that may have contributed to some of their deaths. The
near total lack of independent oversight in Scorpion, documented in this
report, has exacerbated these abuses and contributed to impunity.
Though
detainees have alleged serious abuses at a number of prisons, many of which
hold political prisoners – such as Borg al-Arab in Alexandria, where Morsy is
confined – Scorpion has re-emerged as the central site for those deemed enemies
of the state, a designation that now includes the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Sisi’s
primary political opposition.
Show More Services
A satellite photograph of Scorpion Prison taken in September
2016. Inmates suffer abuses in secret and are denied most access to the outside
world. Satellite imagery.
© 2016 DigitalGlobe
– NextView
Built amid one of the country’s most violent
internal conflicts, Scorpion has for most of its history been used to hold
those viewed as Egypt’s most dangerous prisoners, including alleged members
of al-Gama`a al-Islamiyya(the Islamic Group) and Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, both of which participated in a widespread extremist insurgency in the
1980s and 1990s that targeted foreigners and the Egyptian government and left
hundreds dead. Among Scorpion’s prisoners were those accused of taking part in
the assassinations of President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 and speaker of
parliament Rifaat al-Mahgoub in 1990.
By the 2000s, this conflict had ebbed, and the
authorities released thousands who had been held for years without trial. But
after 2013, Scorpion returned to its old role.
Set within the Tora Prisons Area, a government
compound on the Nile River at the southern edge of Cairo, Scorpion sits at the
end of the state’s repressive pipeline, overseen at nearly all points by the
Interior Ministry and its internal security service, the National Security
Agency (Qata` al-Amn al-Watani). In scores of cases documented by
Human Rights Watch, those deemed opponents of the government are investigated
and arrested by National Security agents, tortured into confessions by those
agents during periods of forced disappearance that can last for weeks or
months, and then put on trial while being held, in near isolation without
meaningful access to a lawyer, in prisons where National Security officers hold
sway.
Relatives believe that Scorpion’s four
“H-blocks,” containing 320 cells, currently hold around 1,000 prisoners,
including most of the top leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are
imprisoned alongside alleged members of the extremist group Islamic State, also
known as ISIS. Some of those held in Scorpion are not members of any Islamist
movement, such as the journalist Hisham Gaafar and the activist doctor Ahmed
Said.
While the Egyptian authorities generally try
to prevent unsanctioned information about prisons from reaching the public,
they go to even greater lengths at Scorpion. Visits with relatives and lawyers
are irregular, banned for long periods, and last for just a few minutes.
Inmates are not allowed to give interviews or communicate with people outside
in any way. On rare occasions during court hearings, they are allowed to speak
briefly in the presence of the media. Only a few of those sent to Scorpion
since 2013 have been released. Human Rights Watch was aware of only one
released prisoner who has spoken about his experience publicly: Al Jazeera
correspondent Abdullah al-Shamy, who was held there for one month in 2014. Many
inmates have been handed multiple long sentences by criminal courts and remain
detained pending appeals that typically last for years. Others are held in
pretrial detention, often on a variety of serious charges, without
consideration of bail.
Though Scorpion, like all prisons in Egypt,
falls under the administration of the Interior Ministry’s Prisons Authority
Sector, in practice the National Security Agency maintains almost total
control. This arrangement, which has been the case since Scorpion’s inception,
when the agency was known as State Security Investigations (Mabahith Amn
al-Dawla), means that Egypt’s primary internal security agency, with its long
record of torture and other abuses, is responsible not only for the
investigation and arrest of suspects, but also for their treatment during
incarceration.
Visit Bans
Scorpion lies behind a veil of secrecy that
both permits and exacerbates abuse. Interior Ministry authorities maintain this
secrecy primarily by regularly and arbitrarily banning visits to the prison by
both family members and lawyers. From roughly March to August 2015, the
Interior Ministry banned all visits to Scorpion. The ban started almost
immediately after al-Sisi appointed Egypt’s current interior minister, Magdy
Abd al-Ghaffar. All of the relatives interviewed by Human Rights Watch agreed
that conditions in Scorpion deteriorated dramatically after al-Ghaffar’s March
2015 appointment.
The visit ban prevented families from
delivering food, medicine, and clothes that were either unavailable or in
meager supply inside the prison, which some relatives called a “starvation”
policy. Some said their family members lost 29 to 34 kilograms (65 to 75
pounds) of weight. At least six Scorpion inmates died in custody during or soon
after this lockdown period (see below). The ban prevented some family members
from visiting relatives on death row who were executed without notice,
violating Egyptian law.
Though the Interior Ministry lifted the
blanket visit ban in August 2015, the authorities continue to regularly and
arbitrarily deny visits, whether by relatives or lawyers, and to limit their
length to around five to ten minutes. To do so, they rely on a vaguely worded
article of Egypt’s prisons law, unchanged since 1956, which allows visits “to
be restricted or completely banned due to conditions at certain times for
reasons of health or related to security.”
Lawyers, when allowed to visit, are restricted
to seeing their clients in the office of the prison’s warden or chief of
investigations. A guard or prison official sits in the same room at every
meeting and does not allow either lawyer or inmate to have paper or a writing
instrument. These restrictions leave prisoners unable to prepare their legal
defense and violate their right to a fair trial. The authorities have arrested
and forcibly disappeared at least one lawyer, Mohamed Sadek, who won several
court victories on behalf of Scorpion inmates’ relatives, according to his
colleagues.
Poor Prisons Conditions
Scorpion authorities do not allow inmates to
possess basic necessities for comfort and hygiene, including soap, shampoo,
combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shaving kits, plates, eating utensils, or
other items such as watches, books, prayer rugs, and paper or writing
instruments. Newspapers and books, except school books in some cases, are
forbidden.
The denial of basic necessities for hygiene
has caused or exacerbated afflictions like skin rashes and infections and left
inmates unable to maintain their usual physical appearance.
According to relatives, cells in Scorpion do
not contain beds. Instead, inmates sleep on low concrete platforms. Most
relatives said that their family members have never had mattresses and rely on
two or three blankets provided by the prison or flattened cardboard boxes for
cushioning. One family told Human Rights Watch that their relative had a
mattress in his cell, and three said that their family members had mattresses in
the past but that prison authorities confiscated them.
The authorities’ denial of basic items of
comfort and hygiene amounts, under international norms for treating prisoners,
to degrading treatment apparently intended to humiliate them.
Interference with Medical Treatment
Interior Ministry officials regularly
interfere with Scorpion inmates’ medical treatment. During periods when visits
are banned, they forbid relatives from delivering medicine that is unavailable
in the prison pharmacy. Even when visits are allowed, guards sometimes
arbitrarily seize medication, stripping pills out of their packaging and
throwing some away or mixing pills in a bag, meaning that oftentimes not all of
the medicine will be delivered to the pharmacy, relatives said.
National Security and Prisons Authority
officers have denied requests by prisoners to be taken outside Scorpion for
medical care – even when such requests were endorsed by prosecutors – and have
flouted doctors’ instructions by returning prisoners to Scorpion before their
treatment finished, several families said. Scorpion authorities almost never
tell relatives when inmates fall ill or are transferred to outside clinics or
hospitals.
There is no hospital inside Scorpion, and all
of the relatives interviewed by Human Rights Watch agreed that inmates do not
receive regular visits from a prison doctor, as mandated by Egyptian law. This
denial of care has left Scorpion inmates suffering from serious medical
problems – including diabetes, Hepatitis C, epilepsy and heart disease –
without regular access to their prescribed medicine or specialist treatment.
Prisoners with chronic or advanced illnesses are particularly vulnerable in
such an environment.
Deaths in Custody
At least six Scorpion inmates died in custody
during or soon after the period in 2015 when all visits were banned. Relatives
and lawyers of three of the six inmates told Human Rights Watch that the
authorities had refused to consider conditionally releasing them on medical
grounds, prevented them from receiving timely treatment, and failed to
seriously investigate their deaths. In one case, prosecutors withheld a burial
permission form until a relative of the deceased inmate promised not to file a
complaint about the lack of medical care.
Essam Derbala, a leader of the Islamic Group
who had previously been held for two decades in the Tora prison complex and who
had diabetes, was not allowed to receive his medicine despite appearing at an
August 2015 court hearing shaking and unable to stand or control his own
urination. He died following the hearing, after prison officials refused to
supply him with medicine delivered by his family, despite prosecutorial and
judicial orders to do so, according to his brother.
Another inmate, Farid Ismail – a former member
of parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party – died in
May 2015 around a week after falling into a hepatic coma in his cell in
Scorpion and being transferred to an outside hospital. Khairat al-Shater, a
deputy supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood who is held in Scorpion, told
his daughter, Aisha al-Shater, that prison officers had ignored inmates’ pleas
to help Ismail.
Al-Shater’s daughter told Human Rights Watch
that during the period when Ismail died, authorities did not allow inmates to
leave their cells, so her father and others arranged a system to check on each
other’s health by knocking on their cell doors or shouting. On the day of
Ismail’s death, Ismail did not reply to the roll call, and they assumed that he
was sleeping or had not heard. Later that night, when they asked the guards to
check on Ismail, the guards told them it was “none of their business.” The
following day, after they had still not heard from Ismail, they caused a
commotion, and the guards eventually came and removed Ismail – who was
unconscious – from his cell.
“Afterward, even calling to each other is
prohibited,” Aisha al-Shater said. “So right now, they say, ‘We are in tombs.
We’re living, but we are in tombs.’"
Physical and Mental Abuse and Hunger Strikes
The poor conditions in Scorpion led some
detainees to begin a hunger strike in February 2016, and by the following
month, at least 57 inmates had joined, according to an inmate’s relative.
Government authorities, including Major General Hassan al-Sohagi, the assistant
interior minister for prisons, responded by threatening some of the hunger
striking inmates with violence, while others were beaten. By August 2016, only
a few prisoners continued to strike, according to the relative.
Officers severely beat one hunger-striking
inmate who, according to a doctor the family consulted, was likely suffering
from epilepsy. The beating left him severely injured and necessitated treatment
in a prison hospital, his brother and another relative said. Authorities
heavily sedated him and another hunger striker without their consent, after
which the second man lost consciousness for around a day and a half and vomited
blood.
Al-Shamy, the Al Jazeera correspondent, spent
his month of imprisonment in Scorpion on a hunger strike. He told Human Rights
Watch that officers twice tried to end his strike by force-feeding him and
sedated him without his consent during one of those attempts.
Scorpion authorities have beaten and humiliated
inmates and held them for weeks at a time in small cells in a “discipline wing”
that lack electricity, running water, or a toilet, restricting those held in
such cells to an even more limited diet than the general prison population.
Prisoners and their family members claimed that this treatment was meant to
punish and intimidate them.
Mohamed al-Beltagy, a high-ranking Muslim
Brotherhood member and former member of parliament, claimed in an August 2016
court hearing that Major General al-Sohagi and another high-ranking Interior
Ministry officer forced him during a recent cell inspection to strip and squat
while they filmed him in order to force him to withdraw a complaint against
President al-Sisi. Aisha al-Shater said her father has told her that inmates
have been made to lie on the ground while officers take pictures and “stomp” on
their stomachs.
Lack of Oversight
Though Egyptian law gives several agencies
power to inspect prisons, in practice, independent authorities rarely exercise
oversight. This is not a new problem. In a 1993 report that followed visits to
six prisons in Egypt, Human Rights Watch identified the Interior Ministry’s
control over prisons as a key factor underlying abuse.
The Law on the Organization of Prisons, issued
by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in November 1956 and still in effect, though
amended many times, gives Interior Ministry inspectors, governors, judges, and
prosecutors the right to inspect prisons. Human Rights Watch was aware of only
one occasion – the case of al-Shamy, which involved unusually high
international attention – when any group empowered to inspect prisons exercised
that oversight power in Scorpion.
The government funded National Council for
Human Rights has visited Scorpion three times, but only after securing
permission from the authorities and without the ability to meet inmates in
private. A coalition of Scorpion families criticized the council after its most
thorough visit to the prison, in August 2015, saying that it had whitewashed
the abuse occurring inside.
The inability or lack of will to exercise
oversight in Scorpion prevents prisoners from making complaints about their
treatment and fosters an environment of impunity for abuse.
International Standards
The international norms regarding prison
conditions are set out in the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the
Treatment of Prisoners, which were updated and renamed the “Nelson Mandela
Rules” by the UN General Assembly in December 2015. The first Mandela rule
states that all prisoners “shall be treated with the respect due to their
inherent dignity and value as human beings. No prisoner shall be subjected to,
and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be
invoked as a justification.”
Under international law and the Mandela Rules,
the authorities’ physical abuse and prolonged use of “discipline” cells qualify
as cruel and inhuman treatment and probably amount to torture in some cases.
Their interference in medical treatment and force-feeding of at least one
hunger-striking inmate also constituted cruel and inhuman treatment, and in the
case of inmates who died in custody, might have violated their right to life.
Human Rights Watch calls on Egyptian
authorities to take a number of immediate and longer-term steps to improve
conditions in Scorpion and allow greater supervision of prisons countrywide.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry should
immediately implement critical changes at Scorpion, and any other Egyptian
prison where similar abuses take place, in order to bring its prisons into
compliance with both Egyptian and international law. These should include:
ending arbitrary visit bans; ensuring that prisoners have regular access to
doctors and appropriate medical treatment; and providing them with the minimum
of daily necessities for hygiene and comfort.
The Egyptian government should allow
independent international detention monitors to visit Scorpion Prison. The
government should also form an independent national committee composed of
doctors, human rights lawyers, independent human rights groups, current and
former judges and prosecutors, and others and give the committee the authority
and mandate to make unannounced prison visits, meet with prisoners privately,
submit complaints for investigation to a special prosecutor, and prepare
legislation to improve prison conditions. The government should also invite the
African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) to visit Egypt to
assess the human rights situation and grant the ACHPR access to Scorpion and
other detention facilities. The African Union High-Level Panel for Egypt
recommended such a visit in its final report in 2014.
The Egyptian public prosecution should
investigate and if appropriate charge those with command responsibility for
Scorpion Prison in connection with the possible acts of torture and cruel and
inhuman treatment committed by guards and officials. Prosecutors should
exercise their lawful oversight powers by making inspection visits to Scorpion
and other prisons, taking prisoner complaints for investigation, and
prosecuting officials when there is evidence of abuse.
Finally, the Egyptian parliament should ratify
the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which requires both state and
international monitoring of detention sites in order to prevent abuse.
Parliament should also amend the country’s prisons law to eliminate the overly
broad justification for visit bans, limit the use of solitary confinement, and
mandate prosecutorial visits to prisons.
Human Rights Watch sent detailed inquiries
regarding conditions and policies at Scorpion Prison to the Interior Ministry
and Prosecutor General’s Office on August 12, 2016, and copied the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. At the time this report was being prepared for publication in
mid-September, there had been no response to these letters.
To Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
- Provide
unrestricted access to Scorpion Prison to a recognized international
monitor of detention conditions.
- Prepare
a plan, in collaboration with a recognized international monitor, to
improve conditions in the prison.
- Propose
a law establishing a national mechanism to prevent torture and other
cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in prisons – such as an independent
committee of medical doctors, human rights lawyers, members of independent
human rights organizations, law professors, former judges or prosecutors,
and representatives from the Justice and Interior ministries – that will
be empowered to visit any prison without prior approval, meet prisoners in
private, obtain all information concerning the number of prisoners and
their treatment, and submit complaints for investigation to a special
prosecutor.
- Invite
the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to visit Egypt to
assess the human rights situation and grant the commission access to
Scorpion and other detention facilities.
Take the following
immediate steps at Scorpion Prison, in accordance with Egyptian law:
- Cease
the use of arbitrary visit bans and allow families to conduct 60 minute
visits once every week with detainees held in pretrial detention and once
every 15 days with convicted inmates.
- Allow
inmates to write four letters a month and have phone conversations of up
to three minutes twice a month.
- Ensure
that a prison doctor visits sick inmates and inmates held in isolation
once a day and transfer sick inmates to a prison hospital as needed based
on their medical condition.
- Allow
and encourage prison doctors to submit requests for medical release for
inmates suffering from life-threatening or incapacitating illnesses.
- Implement
doctors’ recommendations to change prisoners’ diets or treatment, and if
there is disagreement, refer the case to the head of the prison’s medical
department for the formation of a committee to consider it.
- Provide
all prisoners with the minimum set of bedding, clothes, and personal
hygiene products mandated by law, including: a bed, a mattress, a pillow,
a wool blanket (and two in winter), plastic plates and spoons, a comb, two
pieces of soap, two changes of clothes, and underwear if the prisoner
cannot purchase his own.
- Allow
prisoners to possess books, newspapers, and magazines.
- Cooperate
and assist in the investigation of any inmate’s death, including by
turning over all relevant files to prosecutors and ensuring they are made
available to relatives and lawyers.
- Order
a review of medical procedures in places of detention and prisons.
- Investigate
and if appropriate charge those with command responsibility for Scorpion
Prison in connection with possible acts of torture and cruel and inhuman
treatment committed by guards and officials.
- Exercise
the oversight power provided by law by inspecting Scorpion Prison
regularly to ensure that the Interior Ministry is complying with the law.
- Visit
inmates during these inspections and investigate their complaints.
- Prosecute
Interior Ministry officers who have committed serious abuses, such as
those who have beaten inmates or interfered with critical medical
treatment.
- Investigate
the deaths of prisoners in Scorpion, including by ordering autopsies if
the family permits, and make the findings public.
- Ratify
the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
- Pass
an amendment to Law 94 of 2003 regulating the National Council for Human
Rights that will allow the council to conduct unannounced visits to
detention sites, intervene in lawsuits, and file complaints to the public
prosecution.
- Strike
article 42 of Law 396 of 1956 for the Organization of Prisons, which
allows visits to be “banned totally or restricted” for security reasons.
- Amend
article 85 of Law 396, which gives prosecutors the optional right to
inspect prisons, to instead require prosecutors to make such inspections
regularly and submit reports on their findings to their superiors.
- Amend
article 43 of Law 396 to bring the allowable period of solitary
confinement in line with international law and to eliminate the prolonged
use of a “maximum security” cell.
This report is based on personal interviews
conducted in February and April 2016 by a Human Rights Watch researcher with
eight relatives of Scorpion inmates and remote interviews conducted between May
and August 2016 by a researcher and an assistant researcher with 12 family
members and two lawyers. It also includes information from an interview
conducted in September 2014 with Al Jazeera correspondent Abdullah al-Shamy,
who spent nearly a year in prison, including one month in Scorpion, and was
released in June 2014.
Human Rights Watch reviewed photographs of one
deceased Scorpion prisoner, Emad Hassan, medical reports related to several
inmates, and the Egyptian laws and regulations that govern prisons and the
treatment of prisoners in their original Arabic. A researcher reviewed a
165-page Human Rights Watch report, issued in February 1993, regarding the
treatment of prisoners in Egypt. This report, “Prison Conditions in Egypt: A
Filthy System,” was published after Human Rights Watch visited six Egyptian
prisons in 1992, including three inside the same Tora prison complex where
Scorpion would open the following year.
An Egyptian group helped arrange the personal
interviews, which were conducted in Arabic with English translation. Human
Rights Watch conducted later interviews by telephone, email, and text message
in Arabic and English. Human Rights Watch informed each interviewee of the
purpose of the interview and the way their information would be published. Some
interviewees requested that information be withheld to protect their family’s
safety. No interviewee received any direct or indirect remuneration for their participation.
Because of the Egyptian authorities’
prosecution of political opponents and human rights researchers – including
travel bans, asset freezes, and judicial investigations on charges that could
carry 25-year prison sentences – Human Rights Watch has not published the name
of any person or group who wrote or assisted with this report.
On August 12, 2016, Human Rights Watch faxed
detailed letters with questions about conditions and policies at Scorpion to
the International Relations Department of the Information Ministry, addressing
the letters to the Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General’s Office and
copying the Foreign Affairs Ministry. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry
confirmed receipt of the letters on the same day and said he would forward them
to the interior minister and head of the ministry’s Prisons Authority Sector.
On August 16, a spokesman for the Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed that he
also had received both letters. At the time this report was being prepared for
publication in mid-September, there had been no response to any of these
letters. Future responses to this report from the Egyptian government will be
posted on the Egypt page of the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org.
The
Tora prison complex occupies 1.3 square kilometers (332 acres) in southern
Cairo and houses at least six detention facilities administered by the Interior
Ministry. These facilities include: Tora Liman, Tora Farm, Tora Reception, Tora
Annex, Tora Maximum Security Prison 2, and Tora Maximum Security Prison, also
known as the Scorpion.
The
Tora site has been built up over the course of more than a century, and various
authorities in Egypt have employed it as a prison since at least 1885, when the
Interior Ministry of Khedive Tawfiq Pasha decreed the establishment of Tora
Liman for convicts serving sentences with hard labor.[1] In
1908, during the British-backed reign of Egypt’s final khedive, Tora Farm was
added, and in 1989, the government of President Hosni Mubarak ordered the
establishment of Tora Reception and Tora Annex.[2]
Tora’s notoriety grew with the onset of
extremist Islamic violence in the early 1990s, as the state sought space in
newer, high-security facilities to house thousands of people accused of supporting
or participating in an armed insurgency, many of whom were held for years
without trial.
This insurgency had its roots in the 1981
assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat, which had been carried out by
members of a loosely connected confederation of radicals, organized by future
al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, that operated under the name al-Jihad. After
al-Sadat’s killing, the government suppressed both armed and non-violent
Islamist groups and jailed hundreds of people accused of involvement with
al-Jihad or al-Gama`a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group),
another radical organization, as well as members of the Muslim Brotherhood,
which had renounced violence years before.
But in 1989, the attempted assassination of
Interior Minister Zaki Badr announced the return of violence.[3] Over the next six years, militants,
mostly from the Islamic Group, waged a campaign of violence against foreigners
and Egyptian authorities, killing hundreds and carrying out several
assassination attempts against high-ranking officials.[4]
Under Egypt’s long-running and regularly
renewed state of emergency, reactivated after al-Sadat’s assassination, the
Interior Ministry’s secret police, called State Security Investigations (Mabahith
Amn al-Dawla), enjoyed nearly unchecked power to arrest suspected militants
and hold them for years without trial, using the emergency laws to keep
“security detainees” in preventive detention. The US Department of State, in
its 1994 human rights report on Egypt, wrote that prison officials “impose[d]
particularly harsh living conditions on some categories of prisoners such as
Islamic activists.”[5] By
2001, local human rights groups estimated that the population of those
“detained administratively in recent years under the Emergency Law on suspicion
of terrorist or political activity” amounted to between 13,000 and 16,000
people.[6]
In February 1992, as the violence escalated,
Human Rights Watch researchers visited six Egyptian prisons, including Tora
Farm, Tora Liman, and Tora Reception, the latter of which was being used by the
authorities to hold around 400 security detainees – alleged members of Islamic
extremist groups – many of whom had undertaken hunger strikes.[7]
Conditions in the Tora prison complex were
squalid and overcrowded, and the Interior Ministry had issued a decree eight
months before the visit ordering the construction of a new maximum security
prison on the site.[8] The
purpose of the facility, the decree stated, would be to hold “preventive
detainees in state security cases.”[9] At
a cost of nearly $10 million, it would house up to 1,000 inmates, General
Mahmoud Fakarani, the assistant interior minister for prisons, told Human
Rights Watch at the time.[10] Construction
concluded in May 1993. By the following year, this new facility, Tora Maximum
Security Prison, had become known as the Scorpion.[11]
Walled off from the rest of the Tora prison
complex, Scorpion Prison contained 320 cells arranged in four H-shaped blocks.
After its construction, the authorities filled it with those they viewed as
Egypt’s most dangerous prisoners, including members of the Islamic Group and
al-Jihad, by now known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Scorpion quickly gained notoriety as a site of
indefinite detention. In one case, State Security Investigations held Hassan
al-Gharabawi, a lawyer and Islamic Group activist arrested in 1989 for alleged
violence against the police, for more than a decade without trial, despite at
least 30 court decisions ordering his release.[12]
State Security Investigations effectively ran
Scorpion with extrajudicial authority. In December 1993, seven months after
Scorpion opened and four months after Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi survived
an assassination attempt, al-Alfi banned lawyers and families from making any
visits to the prison.[13] In
April 1994, a court ruled the ban unconstitutional. A few days later, one of
the lawyers who had successfully challenged the ban, a member of the Islamic
Group, was arrested by State Security Investigations and tortured to death
overnight.[14] The
day before he died, he had sent the court judgment overturning the visit ban to
the warden of Scorpion Prison.[15] This
scenario would echo 22 years later, when authorities arrested and disappeared a
lawyer who had won court victories on behalf of Scorpion inmates’ relatives.[16]
The Interior Ministry ignored the court order
to restore visits, and al-Alfi extended the ban to other prisons. For nearly a
decade, the Interior Ministry kept the ban in place, despite 112 administrative
court rulings against it.[17]
In a 165-page report published in February
1993, Human Rights Watch described severe conditions in the Tora Liman and Tora
Reception prisons that mirror those in Scorpion today.[18] The abuses included the beating of
inmates, confinement in their cells for months at a time, bans on visits by
relatives and lawyers, a prohibition on all written materials, and interference
in medical care.
In a dark coincidence, two Tora Liman inmates
interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 1992 and released more than a decade
later, Essam Derbala and Nabil al-Maghraby, were later rearrested, held in
Scorpion, and died in custody in 2015. Their deaths are documented in this
report.[19]
Derbala, a leading member of the Islamic Group
imprisoned for his alleged involvement in al-Sadat’s assassination, told Human
Rights Watch in 1992 that guards had beaten him and shredded his clothes after
he sent a letter of complaint to President Mubarak.[20]
Al-Maghraby, a former military intelligence
officer and alleged member of al-Jihad also imprisoned for al-Sadat’s
assassination, said in 1992 that he suffered from a peptic ulcer, water in his
lungs, cardiac problems, and edema, and he showed Human Rights Watch his
“grossly swollen and purplish-red legs.”[21] A
report from a prison doctor in 1990 had recommended that he be immediately
transferred to al-Manial University Hospital, but al-Maghraby said that State
Security Investigations had refused to move him.[22]
“Suspected Islamist militants were held in
almost complete isolation from the outside world,” Human Rights Watch wrote of
Scorpion in 1997.[23] Local
human rights groups reported that guards had beaten inmates for possessing
pens, watches, and pocket radios.[24]
“The Scorpion, a new prison within the
high-security section of Cairo’s Tora Prison complex, is one of Egypt’s most
dreaded detention sites,” a writer with the New Yorkermagazine
reported in 1995. She added that “a number of lawyers and judges” had told her
that Scorpion was built with US assistance.[25] Human
Rights Watch was not able to confirm that claim independently.[26]
Following an agreement between the US Central
Intelligence Agency and Egyptian authorities in 1995, the CIA began returning
convicted fugitives to Cairo in exchange for obtaining information extracted
from them under torture by Egyptian interrogators, according to the journalist
Jane Mayer.[27] In
2004, a British journalist alleged that prisoners sent to Egypt under this
“extraordinary rendition” program had been held in Scorpion.[28]Though
Human Rights Watch was unable to confirm whether Scorpion itself had been used
to hold such prisoners, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian imam known as
Abu Omar whom the CIA abducted in Milan, Italy, in February 2003 and rendered
to Egypt, told Human Rights Watch in 2007 that he had spent 12 to 16 months in
Tora Reception Prison after his torture at other sites run by State Security
Investigations.[29] La
Repubblica reported that he had been held in a solitary cell measuring
1.5 by 2 meters (5 by 6.5 feet).[30]
“[It’s] a prison where there is no sunlight or
fresh air. The amount of air is barely enough for people to breath,” Major
General Ibrahim Abd al-Ghaffar, a former Scorpion warden, said during a
television interview in 2012. “It was designed so that those who go in don’t
come out again unless dead. It was designed for political prisoners.”[31]
The prison had been built sturdily, with
armor-plated cell doors, to hold members of the Islamic Group’s military wing,
Abd al-Ghaffar said, and it was effectively controlled by State Security
Investigations, not the Prisons Authority.
“An officer from State Security was present.
He would tell the officer in charge there, who would be useless and scared of
State Security, ‘Don’t open the cells where these detainees are held unless I
give an order,’” Abd al-Ghaffar said. “Every three months, the interior
minister would issue a decree banning them from receiving visitors.”[32]
By the 2000s, the conflict between extremists
and the state had ebbed, and Mubarak’s government released thousands of those
who had been held for years in various prisons in preventive detention. But in
July 2013, the military, led by Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi,
overthrew Mohamed Morsy, Egypt’s first freely elected leader and a high-ranking
member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a new period of unrest ensued. The
following year, al-Sisi was elected president, winning 97 percent of the vote.
The arrest campaign that followed Morsy’s
ouster was one of the widest in Egypt’s modern history. Between July 2013 and
May 2014, Egyptian authorities arrested or charged at least 41,000 people in
connection with the fallout, according to a documented count by the Egyptian
Center for Economic and Social Rights. The Egyptian Coordination for Rights and
Freedoms, an activist and legal support group, said that security forces made
at least 26,000 additional arrests between the beginning of 2015 and August
2016.
The Egyptian government admitted to arresting
tens of thousands of people. In March 2014, the Associated Press, citing
military and Interior Ministry officials, reported that roughly 16,000 people
had been arrested since Morsy’s removal.[33] By
July 2014, that number had risen to 22,000.[34] Then,
in October 2015, the assistant interior minister for public security said that
police had arrested nearly 11,900 people on terrorism charges that year alone,
bringing the number of acknowledged arrests since Morsy’s ouster to roughly
34,000.[35]
Egyptian prison authorities do not release
statistics, and the prison population has long been notoriously hard to
determine. In its annual human rights report for 2011, the United States State
Department reported that there were 66,000 prisoners in Egypt.[36] In
2013, the most recent year for which it released an estimate, the State
Department reported, improbably, that the number had dropped to 62,000.[37] It
is unlikely that those figures reflected the number of prisoners held on
political charges or those held in police stations, security directorates, and
other unofficial detention sites. The Interior Ministry general who was in
charge of prisons following Morsy’s ouster and who left office in September
2013 later said that there had been 80,000 prisoners at the time, not counting
those held outside official prisons.[38]
The influx of new detainees strained Egypt’s
detention system. Though Human Rights Watch could not determine how many people
were sentenced or imprisoned since July 2013, the semi-official National
Council for Human Rights wrote in its annual report in July 2016 that Egypt’s
prisons had been operating at 150 percent of their capacity in 2015, and the
Egyptian government built or made plans to build eight new prisons between 2013
and 2015.[39]
Since 2013, Scorpion has emerged, again, as
the central prison for those deemed the most dangerous enemies of the state, a
designation that now includes the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains al-Sisi’s
primary opposition.
Based on interviews with
20 relatives of inmates, two lawyers, and one former prisoner, Human Rights
Watch found that Interior Ministry authorities at Scorpion Prison have, in
order to intimidate and humiliate and in some cases as retribution for hunger strikes,
subjected inmates to physical abuse and prolonged confinement in cramped and
airless “discipline” cells, practices that qualified as cruel and inhuman
treatment and likely amounted to torture in certain cases.
Additionally, Human Rights Watch found that
the authorities’ regular interference in medical treatment – including the
arbitrary denial of medicine and the delay or refusal of outside medical care –
also constituted cruel and inhuman treatment and in the case of inmates who
died in custody might have violated their right to life.
Finally, Human Rights Watch found that the
authorities’ denial of basic items of comfort and hygiene – such as beds,
mattresses, soap, toothbrushes, and watches – amounted to degrading treatment
apparently intended to humiliate the prisoners.
All of these abuses, in addition to long and
arbitrary bans on visits from relatives and lawyers – which also violate
inmates’ right to fair trial – contravene the international norms laid out in
the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.[40]
Scorpion lies behind a veil of secrecy that
both permits and exacerbates abuse. Interior Ministry authorities maintain this
secrecy primarily through regularly and arbitrarily banning visits to the
prison by both family members and lawyers. The longest ban in the period
covered by this report lasted from March to August 2015. Even when visits are
allowed to occur with regularity, Scorpion prisoners are at all times forbidden
from communicating with people outside the prison by any means, including
letters or phone calls, and from giving or taking any papers from their
lawyers. Journalists are not allowed to visit.
These policies create a fertile environment
for abuse. Their effect, combined with the absence of independent oversight, is
to make it difficult and sometimes impossible for inmates to pass on
information about mistreatment and poor conditions. This lack of access to
visitors and legal representation has a direct impact on prisoners’ rights,
including their ability to obtain information about their own legal proceedings
and to receive clothes, food, and important medication.
Egyptian law allows inmates in pretrial
detention to receive weekly visits and convicted inmates to receive visits
every 15 days. But the law also allows prison authorities to restrict or
completely ban visits “at certain times” for “reasons of health or related to
security.”[41]This
vague provision, unchanged since 1956, essentially gives Interior Ministry
officials carte blanche to ban visits at any time and without providing any
reason.
The families interviewed by Human Rights Watch
agreed that the worst visit ban, which lasted for between four and five months,
began when Interior Minister Magdy Abd al-Ghaffar took office in March 2015.
The authorities gave no explanation when it began, they said. Even after this
ban ended, Scorpion authorities for months required many relatives to obtain
special visit permissions from the Supreme State Security Prosecution, which
sometimes arbitrarily banned visits for prisoners in certain cases while
allowing visits for others.
Aya Alaa, the wife of journalist Hassan
al-Qabbani, told Human Rights Watch that guards raided her husband’s cell in
March 2015, took all his belongings, and did not allow her to visit again until
June.[42] The
son of Mohamed Ali Beshr, a former governor, cabinet minister, and senior
Muslim Brotherhood negotiator before his arrest in November 2014, said his
mother was not allowed to visit Beshr between June and August 2015.[43] Aisha
al-Shater, a daughter of Muslim Brotherhood deputy supreme guide Khairat
al-Shater, told Human Rights Watch that family members were not allowed to see
her father for four months and 10 days between March and August 2015.[44] Relatives
of former Muslim Brotherhood foreign policy official, Essam al-Haddad, and
Muslim Brotherhood spokesman, Gehad al-Haddad, said authorities did not allow
either man to receive visits between March and June 2015.[45] A
relative of Khalil Osama al-Aqeed, a 25-year-old former bodyguard for
al-Shater, said that authorities denied the family visits for six months
following his sentencing in June 2015.[46]
“In any other prison, if there’s any
mistreatment or torture, all the media would know, but with Scorpion Prison,
it’s impossible for anyone to know. It’s a prison that’s isolated from the
world,” said Rehab Regab, the wife of Ahmed Sayed, a 33-year-old neurology
clinic doctor accused in a mass trial known as the “Helwan Brigades” case.[47]
Most relatives Human Rights Watch interviewed
said that the authorities have continued to regularly and arbitrarily deny them
visits for weeks at a time, even when visit bans are not in place and they have
obtained permission.
Aisha al-Shater told Human Rights Watch that
during one visit, a guard shouted at her for setting down a bag of food and
took her permission slip and ripped it up.[48] The
wife of Hisham al-Mahdy, a 42-year-old pharmacist accused, in a mass trial, of
membership in ISIS, said she once arrived at the prison with a visit permission
slip obtained by her lawyer only to be told by a guard that it lacked a
necessary stamp.[49] The
brother of al-Aqeed said that on multiple occasions authorities allowed him
into the Tora prison complex and made him wait for hours before telling him
that he could not enter Scorpion, without giving a reason.[50] A
relative of Abdullah Karam, a 20-year-old secondary school student, said that
on six occasions, Scorpion authorities took her permission slip, registered her
visit as having occurred, but prevented her from entering.[51] A
relative of Scorpion inmate, Samy Amin, a 54-year-old chemist and member of the
Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, said the authorities on
multiple occasions registered her name in the morning and then told her in the
afternoon that there would be no visits that day.[52]
The authorities have prevented prisoners on
death row from receiving visits as well, despite the fact that Egyptian law
requires them to inform families of the date of their relative’s execution and
to allow them to visit the day before.
Relatives of two men sentenced to death in a
military court following a prominent terrorism case told Human Rights Watch in
April 2015 that they had not been allowed to visit the men for months.[53] The
authorities did not inform the prisoners’ lawyers or families when they would
be executed, they said. The men were hanged in May 2015. Aisha al-Shater told
Human Rights Watch that she later witnessed the mother of one of the men faint
during her next attempt to visit him in Scorpion Prison when an officer told
her: “We’re allowing you to visit him. We killed him, you can visit him in
[Cairo’s] Zeinhom morgue.”[54]
During the months-long ban on visits in 2015,
the authorities also banned lawyers from meeting with inmates.
A relative of Essam al-Haddad said that his
lawyer had only visited him twice in Scorpion Prison and had not been able to
visit since March 2015, long before the beginning of his trial.[55] The
authorities have allowed Gehad al-Haddad only two visits from his lawyer since
he was moved to Scorpion from Tora Liman, she said. Al-Aqeed, who was
imprisoned in December 2012 and moved to Scorpion Prison a year later after
being accused in a new case, has never been allowed to see a lawyer while in
detention, his brother said.[56]
During visit bans, relatives said, they and
lawyers could see and communicate with prisoners only during short
conversations on the margins of scheduled court hearings, and sometimes not
even then. Often, relatives could only shout greetings to prisoners as they
entered or exited prison transport trucks at the courthouse.[57]
This lack of contact with the outside world,
especially with lawyers, leaves prisoners with little to no knowledge about
their own legal proceedings.
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