CAIRO: The Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners issued a report on prisons in Egypt that will be submitted to the United Nations human rights council last week, and the outlook does not look promising. The report said that Egyptian prisons are suffering from the “primitive” idea that sees “prisons as places of a collection of outlaws and that prisoners get ill-treatment.” The report said that the use violence against prisoners to deter others is widespread and that this type of action was buttressed by the Prison Law itself in the country. The report said that the violence is in violation of all international conventions and minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners. Rights groups in Egypt have long complained of the poor treatment of prisoners in detention. Victims of prison violence and abuse have regularly been reported by groups and activists in the country. “Conditions in places of detention have not received any attention from the ministries of justice and interior in Egypt,” the report stated. It called for the government to review Article 1 of the Prisons Act, which they said remains despite the ongoing problems and reports from inside Egyptian jails. The report argued that the legislative structure of the texts governing the lives of the detainees have not sufficiently evolved with other related legislation and that the most negative phenomena in Egyptian prisons are in the areas of “health care and the right to communicate with the outside world and the right to education and the phenomenon of enforced disappearances.” The association demanded prisoners be allowed to strike inside prisons if the continued use of torture is being applied, which “is an infringement of international conventions and agreements.” In terms of health care, the rights group argued that this is one of the “most important rights covered by international conventions and its application cannot be found in Egypt. This happens despite the text of Article 33 of the Egyptian Prison Act that provides that the there should be one resident doctor or more in the prison and Article 36, which stipulates that all prisoners who appear to be suffering from any illness or life-threatening risk must be allowed to visit the head of the medical department for examination in conjunction with the forensic doctor to consider his release.” The report criticized the difficulty of prisoners ability to communicate with the outside world, “as well as the expansion of the issuance of decisions to close the prison under the pretext of security concerns and the short duration of the special and regular visits in addition to the abusive and arbitrary control of the communications and correspondences of prisoners with family and the failure to notify the family of the prisoner or detainees place of detention in violation of article 139 of the criminal procedures code.” Activists and rights leaders have argued that these issues are commonplace in Egyptian jails and the ministry of interior continues to usurp judicial rulings to keep individuals behind bars. “We have long struggled to get action taken to clean up the prisons, but the same issues that were abounding decades ago remain the same today and this is something that we hope will get attention very soon,” said Fardous Ali of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR). The report said that despite the legislative structure of the Prisons Act and its so-called provisions to facilitate access to education and access of family members to their imprisoned relatives, “the Administrative Judicial Court pointed out that the ministry of interior hinders this right by preventing the entry of textbooks for political detainees and prevents them from attending their exams under various pretexts, such as the closure of prison.” The association hopes that this report will create the means and attention to help solve the current prison crisis, which has “witnessed in the past 10 years a number of coercive disappearances, which is still continuing and security forces refuse to recognize” it occurrence. “We hope the UN will take notice of what is going on and use their power and means to help push Egypt in a new direction,” added Ali. **reporting by Mohamed Abdel Salam BM
