Human Rights

65 Freed in Egypt; Shawkan Remains in Prison

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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The “Detained Youth Committee” that was established by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this fall to “look into the conditions of pre-trial detainees arrested in cases related to freedom of expression” gave him a list of 83 detainees to grant early releases or pardons. Today, 82 were pardoned, and as of this morning, 65 were freed, but the Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (“Shawkan”) was not among them.

He was not freed and his name was not on the list the committee submitted.
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Lauri Love Extradition Ordered

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The US has ruthlessly persecuted hackers and digital activists for years, and nobody expects that to improve under President Trump. Theresa May set a good example by protecting Gary McKinnon back in 2012. For a Home Secretary in her government now to willingly send a brilliant and vulnerable UK citizen [Lauri Love] to Donald Trump’s America beggars belief.—Sarah Harrison, Courage Foundation Acting Director

On Monday, Amber Rudd, the United Kingdom’s Home Secretary, signed the order to approve Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. From that day, Monday, he and his legal team have fourteen days to file an appeal. The team reports that it intends to do so.

Love is accused of stealing data from U.S. government agencies in 2012 and 2013 as a part of a hacking protest known as #OpLastResort. Because he is in Great Britain and the data breach took place in the United States, the fact that indictments have been filed against him in three district courts is known but how the U.S. plans to proceed is not known. His lawyers estimate that Love faces—if he is extradited, charged with the crimes that they think he is to be charged with, tried, and convicted—up to 99 years in prison.

Love and his lawyers have yet to see any evidence against him.
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When Will Shawkan Be Freed?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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On the good days, the dozen prisoners negotiate their way through the impossibility of the circumstances. The bad days are simply more impossible, because even impossible situations can be made worse.

The prisoners are crowded in a space the size of a child’s bedroom, nine feet by twelve feet, which for obvious reasons does not have cots for all twelve occupants. They take turns sleeping on the cot or on spaces on the floor. A sink and toilet sit open against one wall. The prisoners take turns cooking on a two-plate electric cooker, which during the winter months has served as the unheated prison cell’s heat source.

The sky, the only way to know if it is day or night, is seen through a small gap in the iron bars in the ceiling of the cell. One prisoner wrote in 2014:
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