Amnesty International said today, on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the massacre, that the Egyptian authorities have failed to hold a single member of security forces accountable for the deaths of at least 900 people during the violent dispersal of sit-ins in Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda squares. Twelve individuals are facing execution, and hundreds more are receiving lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the protests, revealing Egypt’s so-called justice system’s twisted priorities.
The Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest appeals court, affirmed death sentences against 12 men, including top Muslim Brotherhood officials, who were convicted in a large bogus trial involving 739 people in 2018, known as the “Rabaa dispersal case.” President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has signed their final death sentences, so they could be executed at any time without warning.
The men have been imprisoned in deplorable conditions since their arrests in 2013 and 2015, in violation of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment, and have been denied access to proper health care. For at than five years, some people have been banned from seeing their families.
Mohamed el-Beltagy, a former MP and top Muslim Brotherhood activist who has been kept in solitary confinement at Cairo’s notorious Scorpion prison since his arrest in August 2013, is among those awaiting execution. Since 2016, his family has been prohibited from visiting him. Attempts by his relatives to give him a picture of his daughter Asmaa, who was 17 years old when she was killed in the Rabaa al-Adawiya square dispersal, have been mercilessly refused by prison authorities.
Mohamed and Mostafa Abdelhai Hussein al-Faramawy, share a cramped cell at Wadi al-Natroun jail that is dark and poorly ventilated and without a toilet. They were detained on July 15, 2013, a month before the demonstrators in Rabaa al-Adawiya plaza were dispersed, and they were sentenced to death for their suspected involvement.
In violation of Egyptian law, Egyptian officials do not publicise scheduled executions in advance and do not tell families or offer them final visits, increasing suspicions that the killings will take place soon. In Egypt, there has recently been an alarming increase in documented executions – executions tripled in 2020 compared to prior years.
Egyptian authorities must immediately stop using the death penalty as a tool to instill terror and consolidate their iron grip on power against political opponents. Washington Center For Human Rights calls on the international community to increase public pressure on President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to commute these death sentences and preserve these men’s lives. WCHR opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the criminal, or the manner of execution chosen by the state. The death sentence is a breach of one’s right to life; it is the cruelest, most inhumane, and most demeaning punishment imaginable.