Nine human rights NGOs on Tuesday called on Egypt to be transparent and release the country’s prison population count on how many people have been detained amid the nation’s crackdown on dissent.
“The Egyptian government is hiding information about the prison population as if it were a state secret, but Egyptians have a right to know how many people their government is holding and how they are being treated,” the official said. senior researcher for the Middle East and the North. Africa for Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amr Magdi, in a statement.
“The lack of transparent figures on the prison population deprives civil society of fundamental tools to assess the effectiveness of the penal system and to monitor prison conditions and other vital human rights issues”, a- he declared.
Egypt’s Interior Ministry Prisons Authority last released regular figures on prisoners in the 1990s.
In recent years, senior officials, including President Abdulfatah el-Sisi, have repeatedly refused to answer journalists’ questions about the prison population.
Human rights groups believe that under President Sisi the prison population has increased dramatically, as authorities have detained tens of thousands of real or suspected dissidents since late 2013, and the crackdown has led to “dangerous overcrowding in detention centers and further undermined their already inhumane conditions.
Although the Egyptian government has not released meaningful figures on the detained population, some officials have given estimates.
In 2017, Alaa Abed, then chairman of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee, told a parliamentary meeting that half of Egypt’s prisoners were in pretrial detention, meaning they had only been sentenced by no judge.
Under al-Sisi, authorities have widely used pretrial detention, particularly in political cases, to keep tens of thousands of people in prison without trial.
Even some pro-government figures have occasionally expressed concern: “The prison overcrowding gives the impression that the government is stifling freedoms and consuming part of the state budget,” Abed said.
International and African laws require authorities to use preventive detention as an exceptional measure, and only when manifestly necessary for specific reasons, such as flight risk and threats against witnesses, and for the duration as short as possible, said the NGOs.