Mannheim – Activists in New York City are on day seven of a hunger strike, declared on July 17, in combination with a sit-in across the street from United Nations headquarters. The protest intends to draw the attention of the international community regarding Egypt’s unprecedented number of politicized death sentences.
Since his military coup in 2013, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has pushed to extend the power of his executive authority to gain control over Egypt’s judiciary, co-opting the judicial system and legalizing arbitrary detention.
Egypt has been executing people at an unprecedented rate, making it the world’s third-worst country in terms of numbers of executions in 2020 which have continued to this year.
Last month in Cairo, sixteen people on death row were executed in a single week, warranting many human rights organizations to demand an immediate moratorium on capital punishment in Egypt. They cited what they described as “the country’s utter lack of an independent and impartial judiciary willing to uphold minimal standards of due process and justice.”
Activists and public figures across the world have announced plans to go on hunger strike in solidarity with several political prisoners who have launched hunger strikes from their prison cells protesting their unlawful detention. While the Egyptian government accuses these men as enemies of the state, many are journalists or political activists who simply criticized the Egyptian government for human rights abuses.
Some of these notable prisoners languishing in jail include journalist Hisham Fouad, graduate student Ahmed Samir Santawy and political activist Ahmed Badawi.
60,000 people have been imprisoned since Egypt’s 2013 military coup.
Last month, an Egyptian court upheld the death sentence for 12 members of the Muslim Brotherhood under unsubstantiated charges of “arming criminal gangs” and “resisting authorities.” The ruling, which cannot be appealed against, means the 12 men could face execution pending approval by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The accused include Abdul Rahman Al-Bar, commonly described as the group’s mufti or top religious scholar, Mohamed El-Beltagi, a former member of parliament, and Osama Yassin, a former minister.
Many activists and social justice groups believe this is the government’s way of silencing any opposition to the president’s rule disguised as a “counterterrorism” measure.
“We are on a hunger strike to bring attention to the 12 men who are going to get killed by way of execution sanctioned by the Egyptian President. Our goal is to stop the executions of these 12 men and to abolish the practice of state sanctioned executions in Egyptian law” Medhat Mahmoud, one of the NYC hunger strikers, stated to Morocco World News.
“The US is complicit because it has fiscally supported the coup through 1.3 billion dollars in aid. We call on Biden to withdraw US military support to Egypt and push for the release of not just these 12 men but of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egyptian jails” Mahmoud said. You can find their campaign here.
