Khaled Ghoneim, host of a talk show in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, had been reporting on the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020 when he used his Facebook page to criticize a news blackout concerning local doctors and nurses who had contracted the virus.
The next day Egyptian authorities, who had imposed a blackout on non-governmental news about COVID-19, showed up at his home and arrested him.
No one heard from him for more than two weeks, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Seventeen days after his post, held incommunicado, Ghoneim was charged with misusing social media, spreading false news and being a member of a terrorist organization.
Two years and three pre-trial detention extensions later, Ghoneim remains in Tora Prison, a facility for both criminals and political prisoners, according to CPJ.
The 49-year-old father of four has had little outside contact and has not seen his children since his arrest, said a close associate who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government retribution. Ghoneim is in good health but suffers mentally, the source said.
The Egyptian Embassy in Washington did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Egypt’s long-held reputation as one of the world’s largest jailers of journalists has only grown worse since the pandemic, when the government restricted all but government-provided news about the virus.
Egypt has been a country in turmoil since the short-lived openness following the 2011 Arab Spring, which ended the 30-year authoritarian rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
After the popular election of Mohamed Morsi, a member of the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, former Egyptian army chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi led a successful coup and imprisoned Morsi, who died in the defendent’s cage during a court hearing on espionage charges against him.
Sisi has since forced the closure of all independent news outlets.
As of 2021, about half of Egypt’s most popular media are supervised and censored by state agencies, and nearly 500 websites are blocked entirely, according to the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
Thousands of Egyptians are detained or imprisoned for opposing the regime, according to a 2021 report from the nonprofit Human Rights Watch.
The U.S. administration, an important ally for Egypt, recently pushed for the improvement of human rights by announcing in September 2021 that it would withhold $130 million in military aid until improvements are made. It accounts for about 9% of the total $1.4 billion in bilateral assistance the U.S. sent to Egypt in both 2021 and 2022’s fiscal years.
Since the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, the United States has given Egypt over $50 billion in military and $30 billion in economic assistance, placing it in the top U.S. aid recipients.
But Egypt now has the most imprisoned journalists of any Middle East or North African country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 25 journalists remain behind bars today, said Sherif Mansour, head of CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program. The exact number of prisoners is unknown, he said.
Ahmed al-Najdi, a long-time producer for the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, is another journalist arrested in his home in 2020 on charges of spreading false news and membership in a terrorist group, al-Najdi’s family and local journalists told CPJ.
Al Jazeera was one of the many news outlets outlawed following Sisi’s coup, accused of “spreading lies” and “supporting terrorism.”
The U.S. Department of State’s most recent report on human rights practices notes that Egyptian law provides a “broad definition of terrorism to include ‘any act harming national unity or social peace,’ ” making terrorism a frequent charge against independent journalists.
Al-Najdi, who lives in Qatar, denies accusations that he was working for Al Jazeera when he arrived in Cairo on vacation, according to CPJ. He is now held in Cairo’s Giza Central Prison, and his pretrial detention has been unlawfully extended every 45 days.
Najdi’s family also told CPJ that he shares his cell with at least 20 others and is denied access to fresh air, a mattress, and medical care for his diabetes, which requires injections he has not received.
The extension of pretrial detention in both al-Najdi’s and Ghoneim’s cases is a commonplace practice. The maximum pretrial detention length, according to Egyptian law, is two years, but the government continually finds ways to renew the process, said Hussein Baoumi, an Amnesty International Egypt and Libya researcher.
“If the regime says this person is dangerous, then they tend to find a way to keep the person in prison,” said Nathan Brown, author and expert on Middle Eastern politics at George Washington University, in a CNS interview. “If you’re caught shoplifting, the system works fine. If it’s a political offense, this system does not have guarantees.”
Yousuf Abdelfatah, project coordinator and case expert at The Freedom Initiative, an organization that advocates for the freedom of prisoners wrongfully detained across the Middle East and North Africa, notes that authorities also often engage in a process known as a “rotation,” where detainees are given new cases on the same accusation, artificially resetting the detention-period clock.
Prison cells in Egypt held some 60,000 political prisoners as of July 2021, Al Jazeera reported. The conditions of these prisons fall well below international standards, according to Abdelfatah of The Freedom Initiative.
Detainees are subject to overcrowding, physical and mental abuse and solitary confinement, along with denial of medical care and visitation rights, said Abdelfatah.
Muhammad Kamal, research assistant for Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), understands these conditions firsthand. A former Egyptian detainee and political activist, he escaped in 2014 to Sudan and then Istanbul.
“Prisons are tombs of alive people where detainees are deprived of any means of life and are provided with all means of killing and death,” he told CNS via email. “There are crowded cells, solitary confinement, deprivation from visitations for years, medical neglect, and no heavy clothes in winter.”
With growing international pressure to improve rights, Sisi announced in 2021 that Egypt would implement a National Strategy for Human Rights, which includes improving prison conditions. But, Baoumi said, there have been no signs of progress, despite increased propaganda surrounding the project.
“The Egyptian government has done absolutely nothing to improve the situation in prisons, and yet it has done everything to give the impression that they are improving the situation in prisons,” he said.
Baoumi said Egyptian authorities also typically threaten journalists and activists even after their release.
Post-release typically includes a limit on travel and required permission from authorities before going overseas or even out of one’s city, he said. The government also places journalists and activists’ names on terrorists lists, preventing former professionals from returning to work, Baoumi said.
Such is the case for Osama Gaweesh, editor-in-chief of EgyptWatch, an independent advocacy and research platform.
“I was an activist in Egypt before 2013, and at that time I wasn’t a journalist,” he told CNS. “Yet the regime destroyed my house, my clinic as a dentist…. They destroyed everything and wanted to arrest and kill me. So I fled the country to Turkey.”
Gaweesh eventually sought asylum in Britain, where he now resides. He has been unable to see his wife and two children in Egypt, though, because their passports are expired and because of fear of government retribution against his family.