His family were attempting to visit him today, 5 March 2020, on the first regular visit scheduled for pre-trial detainees; only to find that he was once again moved to Tora in Cairo. We have not been able to establish yet which of the various detention facilities within the Tora Prison Complex he will be held in, since he was only moved this morning.
Programs: Criminal Justice
Patrick was subsequently transferred from the prosecutor’s office to Talkha Police Station, but his family was surprised to learn yesterday the 24th of February that he was moved to Mansoura Public Prison. Previously The Public Prosecutor had decided to remand Patrick for 15 further days on his scheduled detention renewal hearing (which took place on Saturday the 22nd of February).
EIPR asks the Public Prosecutor to release Patrick George Zaki immediately, and the investigative authorities to close the investigation and dismiss the case, for we do not see any basis for criminal prosecution.
We ask the Public Prosecutor to release Patrick George Zaki immediately, and the investigative authorities to close the investigation and dismiss the case, for we do not see any basis for criminal prosecution.
EIPR demands the immediate release of Patrick George Zaki without pressing charges, and calls for an investigation into his torture and ill-treatment.
The application for leave to appeal was registered on 12 February 2020 under the no. 1372, and on Thursday 13 the prosecution accepted the application and set a hearing session on February 15 to look into the appeal itself.
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.
13 Feb 2020
what happened between 20 September and late October 2019 was an unprecedented development as far as police practice in Egypt and in terms of the magnitude of violation of citizens’ privacy. It seems to have been occasioned by the temporary spread of the videos and live feeds of contractor and actor Mohammed Ali before the demonstrations of 20 September.
On Tuesday, December 3, the al-Waily Criminal Court sentenced officer Nader Nabil Bolous Shenouda and eight lower ranking policemen (sub-officers) to three years in prison in criminal case no. 4126/2016.
It is worth noting that the State Security Prosecution has recently developed a habit of throwing a lot of people who are mainly targeted because of their political inclinations into large cauldron cases with a long list of accusations and a huge number of defendants; defendants who do not necessarily have any links or anything in common, and on charges of incidents that are not only unrelated but that do not even have any intersection time or area wise.
