“Your phone and ID”: first part of a study on emerging routine violations by law enforcement and criminal justice agencies in Egypt.

Stripping citizens of the bare minimum of constitutional protections for the right to a private life and right to due process and legal representation
 

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights has released a legal paper entitled “Your Phone and ID”1, in collaboration with Ahmed Ragheb’s Firm for Law & Legal Consultations, who wrote the legislative and constitutional framework chapter. The paper is part of a series published in installments as part of a project entitled “routine assaults on private life” documenting the normalisation of practices that strip citizens of constitutional protections as a preemptive security measure.

The series documents and provides legal commentary on a number of illegal practices that the law enforcement has recently introduced into routine stop and search operations and subsequent arrests, that constitute severe violation of the few basic rights that Egyptian citizens still enjoy, and which as well are being eroded. These practices have become an institutional norm especially during times of perceived crises and increased security presence in public spaces. The last paper in the series also documents and analyses violations in the process of arraignment and prosecution that sometimes follow these arrests, which strip citizens of the rights to legal defence and due process.

The first of these papers, published today in Arabic (translation forthcoming), documents the most egregious and disproportionate of these measures which has become a routine practice (in particular circumstances) for the police: forced searches of personal mobile phones during arbitrary stop and search operations. This measure has no legal basis at all in Egyptian law, not even in the context of declared emergency. The paper provides a brief narrative of how this practice has evolved from October 2019 and until the end of January 2020. It provides an overview of the few official statements published in relation to the increasing recourse to this measure, from the National Council for Human Rights and the Ministry of Interior, before delving into a detailed constitutional and legal analysis debunking any legal reasoning used by the state in the one attempt made at providing a legal cover for this excessive measure. The paper concludes with a list of policy recommendations for relevant government agencies.

• 1. Reference to a common way in which law enforcement officials address citizens during stop and search operations.