July 18, 2019

El-Nadeem, the most prominent human rights NGO in Egypt, issued on Tuesday a report entitled “From the media: the archive of coercion.” The report presents a toll of human rights violations in Egypt. In the first half of 2019 there were more than 1,000 violations.

According to the report, 302 people were killed by Egyptian governmental forces during this time period. Police forces were not the only people responsible for these killings , the armed forces also participated. There were more than 20 people killed by air raids.

Another 30 people died in custody in police stations, prisons and even in courts; three died from torture and the others mainly of medical negligence. Cases of torture exceeded 300 mainly in prisons and the National Security headquarters, including electric shocks and sexual assaults.

Egyptian authorities continue to forcibly disappear people – the number of cases has hit 399, according to El-Nadeem’s report. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance emphasised in its 2018 annual report that it has worked on the largest number of enforced disappearance complaints in Egypt since the group’s establishment in the 1980s. Committee for Justice, a human rights NGO based in Geneva, had said that it monitored 1,989 cases of enforced disappearance in Egypt from August 2017 to August 2018.