“For 10 years he was in the identical place, in the identical ward, welcoming new inmates and bidding farewell to others … hoping he would get launched in the future and be with us,” his ex-wife, Nourhan Hefzy, wrote on Fb after his launch. “Right now he deserves that all of us take a break to fill our hearts with pleasure.”
Douma led protests throughout Egypt’s 2011 revolution however has since spent practically a decade behind bars. He was arrested together with two different pro-democracy activists in December 2013 for violating a restrictive protest regulation handed by the military-backed authorities that took energy in a coup that summer time. He was sentenced to a few years in jail, earlier than being convicted and sentenced to fifteen years on separate prices in 2015, in a trial that the rights group Amnesty Worldwide known as “grossly unfair and politically motivated.”
Douma was tortured and denied medical care throughout his detention, in response to rights teams. Moved out and in of solitary confinement, he spent greater than 4 years in isolation in whole — remedy that contributed to knee and again ache, extreme melancholy and panic assaults, Amnesty stated.
Douma was beforehand imprisoned for his activism underneath the governments of former presidents Hosni Mubarak — who was deposed in the course of the revolution — and Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president elected after the rebellion.
Thirty different, less-prominent prisoners additionally obtained pardons Saturday, in response to an inventory revealed on social media by Tarek El-Awady, a member of the presidential pardon committee.
Egyptian human rights defenders and former political prisoners hailed the choice to free Douma.
“Douma has not been launched from jail for in the future since 2013,” Mona Seif, the sister of one among Egypt’s most outstanding political prisoners, Alaa Abdel Fattah, tweeted Saturday. “If there’s anybody who deserves freedom it’s him.”
Mostafa Al-A’sar, an Egyptian human rights defender and journalist who was imprisoned for a number of years, shared an previous picture of Douma and him, smiling, “earlier than prisons and detention facilities.”
“Might God compensate you, Douma, for the years of your life that they stole … 10 years of arrest, unjust imprisonment and solitary confinement,” he tweeted. “Freedom for all detainees.”
The most recent spherical of pardons comes after the launch of two different well-known political prisoners final month. Patrick George Zaki, a human rights researcher who had been sentenced simply the day earlier than in reference to an article he wrote on the remedy of the Christian minority in Egypt, was pardoned together with the human rights lawyer Mohamed El-Baqer forward of a nationwide vacation in July.
Their circumstances, together with Douma’s, got here to represent the narrowing of civic area in Egypt, the place Sisi has carried out a far-reaching crackdown on dissent over the previous decade. Formally, the federal government maintains that Egypt has no political prisoners. However human rights teams and researchers estimate that tens of hundreds of individuals — together with journalists, activists and lecturers — have been arrested on political grounds.
In 2021, the Biden administration imposed new human-rights situations on safety support to Egypt, finally deciding in early 2022 to withhold $130 million of the $1.3 billion in U.S. safety help that Egypt receives yearly.
With Egypt going through a deepening financial disaster and determined for overseas funding, Sisi has taken steps lately to deal with worldwide criticism of Egypt’s human rights report. The federal government unveiled the nation’s first human rights technique in October 2021, to combined critiques. Sisi introduced plans final 12 months for a nationwide dialogue billed as a discussion board for debate over political, financial and social reforms. And in April 2022, he reactivated the committee charged with administering presidential pardons of detainees.
Since then, greater than 1,400 individuals have been launched from pretrial detention, in response to state media.
Nonetheless, the Egyptian authorities continues to imprison critics — and a few analysts and political opponents have known as the nationwide dialogue little greater than theater.
The U.S. State Division faces a Sept. 30 deadline to determine whether or not to carry again any portion of the roughly $300 million of overseas navy funding this 12 months that’s topic to human-rights situations.
