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

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In a courtroom near Cairo, Egypt, earlier today (November 19), the case of photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (“Shawkan”) was adjourned once again, this time until Saturday, December 10.

December 10 is also, coincidentally or perversely, International Human Rights Day, celebrated by the United Nations for decades. Shawkan’s story has so far been one of the denial of basic human rights by a nation allied with Western governments, but it also has been a story of many citizens stepping up and making certain that Shawkan’s story is heard.
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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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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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