ICJ and Adalah submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Egypt

Today, the ICJ and Adalah for Rights and Freedoms (Adalah) filed a submission to the Human Rights Council’s Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review in advance of its review of Egypt’s human rights record in November 2019.

 In their submission, the ICJ and Adalah drew the the attention of the Working Group on the UPR to the following concerns:

• arbitrary arrests and detentions and systematic use of pre-trial detention;
• the systematic use of torture, ill-treatment and enforced disappearance;
• the imposition of death penalty following unfair trials; and
• the politicization of the judiciary and the use of courts as a tool of repression.

The ICJ and Adalah called on the Working Group and the Council to urge the Egyptian authorities to :

1. End the practice of holding detainees incommunicado;
2. End all other forms of arbitrary detention;

• Comprehensively reform the pre-trial detention framework, including by ensuring that resort to it is exceptional, and that such detention may be ordered only when it is determined on the basis of evidence that it is necessary, proportionate and reasonable in the circumstances of the individual case;

1. Ensure that pre-trial detention is not mandatory for all individuals charged with a particular category of felony or misdemeanor, or based on the potential sentences for the offences alleged;
2. Ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CED);
3. Enact a crime of enforced disappearance in the Egyptian Criminal Code consistent with article 2 of the CED;

• Amend article 126 of the Criminal Code with a view to enacting a crime of torture consistent with article 1 of the CAT;
• Accept independent monitoring of detention facilities by allowing independent observers immediate access to detainees and prisoners, and to that end, accede to the Optional Protocol to the CAT;

1. Implement all the recommendations of the CAT following its article 20 inquiry;
2. Amend Egyptian law and abolish the use of the death penalty;
3. Pending abolition, implement an immediate moratorium on all executions and on the imposition of capital punishment, including in cases of involving intentional killings;

• Pending abolition, ensure that proceedings in death penalty cases conform to the highest standards of judicial independence, competence and impartiality, and strictly comply with all fair trial rights;
• Pending abolition, ensure that the right to appeal in death penalty cases include review of both the factual and the legal aspects of the case by a higher ordinary, independent and impartial tribunal;
• Pending abolition, provide for the right of individuals convicted in death penalty cases to seek a pardon, commutation of sentence or clemency.

1. Ensure that all convictions in death penalty cases that followed unfair trails are quashed;

• End Executive interference in judicial affairs;
• Limit the jurisdiction of military courts to trials of military personnel only for breaches of military discipline; and
• Abolish Emergency State Security Courts.

Egypt-Adalah_ICJ UPR-Advocacy-Non Legal Submissions-2019-ENG (full text of submission, in PDF)