Since the Egyptian army forcibly removed Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsy, in 2013, the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has greenlighted a nationwide crackdown on protesters, dissidents, political opponents, independent journalists, and human rights defenders. Egypt’s security apparatus has arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted tens of thousands of persons. Human Rights Watch has found that torture crimes against detainees in Egypt are systematic, widespread and likely constitute crimes against humanity. The United Nations Committee against Torture found in June 2017 that that the facts “lead to the inescapable conclusion that torture is a systematic practice in Egypt.”

As an integral part of this crackdown, police and officers of the Interior Ministry’s National Security Agency have arbitrarily arrested, mistreated and tortured hundreds of children. Prosecutors and judges have exacerbated these abuses through due process violations and unfair trials.

Karim Hamida Ali is just one child victim of the government’s crackdown which has weakened the rule of law in Egypt to the point of extinction. International law and Egypt’s Child Law prohibit the use of the death penalty for children. But Egyptian judicial authorities provisionally sentenced Karim to death in April 2019 for crimes allegedly committed when he was 17 years old, during a protest that damaged the façade of a hotel but caused no injuries or deaths. National Security Agency officers detained Karim for more than a month in secret, leaving his family with no idea of his whereabouts, and tortured the boy until he confessed, his family told us. In October 2019, after a public outcry, the judge in the case cancelled Karim’s death penalty, claiming he had not known the defendant was a child, but sentenced him to 10 years in prison. The court did not order any meaningful investigation into Karim’s alleged torture, as required by Egyptian and international law, and used his confession as the basis for his conviction. “No one cared he was a child,” a relative of Karim’s said.

This report, a collaboration between Human Rights Watch and Belady: An Island for Humanity (hereafter: Belady), documents human rights abuses by Egyptian security officials against 20 child detainees, including Karim, who were all arrested or prosecuted for allegedly participating in protests or politically-motivated violence. Authorities detained the children in locations across Egypt, including the Alexandria, Cairo, Dakihlia, Damietta, Giza, Ismailia, Mansoura, North Sinai, Qalubiya, and Sharqiya governorates. In the North Sinai case, security officers forcibly disappeared 12-year-old Abdullah Boumadian for six months, waterboarded and electrocuted him, then placed him in solitary confinement for about 100 days, apparently because his older brother had joined the Islamic-State local affiliate Wilayat Sina’ (Sinai Province). Human Rights Watch previously documented that security forces in North Sinai subjected other children to arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, and extra-judicial execution. 

Two of the other children in this report were only 13 years old when they were arrested, including one girl, Nadeen N. All of the children were

Report by the Human Rights Watch