Joint statement: Egypt must immediately and unconditionally release anti-torture protester Mahmoud Hussein .

In 2014, Mahmoud Hussein was arrested in the aftermath of peaceful protests marking the third anniversary of the 25 January 2011 Revolution for wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “A Nation without Torture” and a scarf with the “25 January Revolution” logo. [...] Because he was tried in his absence, Mahmoud Hussein is now facing a retrial on bogus charges of membership of a “terrorist” group and involvement in violence, stemming from the exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly which led to his first arrest in January 2014. [...] In October 2023, a coalition of national and international NGOs, namely REDRESS , the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), Dignity, the Committee for Justice (CFJ) and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), concluded that that the Egyptian’s authorities’ use of torture is so widespread and systematic as to amount to a crime. [...] In March 2023, the UN Human Rights Committee called on Egypt to “ensure that statutory limits to the duration of pretrial detention are enforced, including by putting an end to the involvement of security agencies in the decision-making process on the release of detainees and the practice of “rotation” under which detainees are added to new cases on similar charges”. [...] According to human rights organizations (the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Committee for Justice, El Nadeem Center, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights), at least 251 defendants were rotated to new cases in 2023, and another 620 defendants in 2022, demonstrating the continued involvement of the judicial authorities in violations of the right to fa.