An investigation by The New York Times discovered that Egypt was holding thousands of people in a pre-trial detention system that could last indefinitely, prolonging Egyptian laws that limit such detention and allowing the government to imprison people without having to prove their case in a trial.
There is no public accounting of how many people are held in this system. Our analysis gives a figure for the first time on the detainees trapped in this system.
Between September 2020 and February 2021, at least 4,500 people were held in pre-trial detention, who had been there for at least five months.
That number is not a complete calculation.
It excludes Egyptians who were arrested and released before the five-month deadline, having to appear in court for the first time. It includes only those detained in the Cairo court system, excluding those prosecuted outside the capital. And it doesn’t include prisoners held in police stations or military camps, or others who simply disappeared.
We spent the better part of a year researching the system to report on how it was used, the conditions of the prisons and how many people were trapped inside them.
We found that a group of volunteer defense attorneys kept handwritten diaries of all the cases that passed through Egypt’s special anti-terrorism courts. Detainees usually have a hearing in court after five months of incarceration.
As each case is announced, attorneys record the names of the detainees, their case numbers, and the date they appeared in court. On some days, court officials let them take pictures of the sockets.
An Egyptian human rights group, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, collected copies of the lawyers’ notes and provided them to The Times.
We focused on a six-month period, which gives us enough data to track the operation of the revolving door system in which detainees show up in court every 45 days.
Our first task is to try to match the case name and number. That’s not as simple as it sounds.
We transcribed every handwritten name on the list into a database, converting them from Arabic to English.
Some handwriting is difficult to write. In other cases, lawyers omitted some of the surnames that Egyptians traditionally had, writing one surname on some days, two or three on others.
Because detainees re-appear in court periodically, we have to make sure we’re counting the number of people, not the total number of court appearances.
We wrote custom software that matched similar names with the same file numbers on the different dates they appeared in pre-trial detention. By comparing the sound of each name, we were able to match individuals even when different spellings were used for different hearings. After manually testing each match, we had a dataset that was able to track each player’s path through the system.
Our other reporting – including interviews with detainees’ families, experts, defense attorneys, prisoners and former prisoners – makes it clear that there will be gaps in our data I.
Families speak of loved ones who were apprehended by security officials and then disappeared, never to come before prosecutors or judges. Some former inmates said they had met other detainees in police stations or security services offices, who had been held for months without formal extension.
None of those people will be on our list.
Even if we have the full pre-trial detention population, they make up only a fraction of Egypt’s political prisoners, many of whom have been tried and convicted. Human rights groups and researchers estimate that Egypt currently holds at least 60,000 political prisoners, whose only crimes are critics of the government as well as those accused of terrorist activities.
We may never fully account for the number of people detained for political reasons in Egypt. But now a part of the picture that once existed in the dark has come to light.
