Egypt’s Supreme State Security Prosecution has summoned human rights lawyer Mahienour El-Massry for questioning in case No. 6322 of 2025. The interrogation is scheduled for Monday, El-Massry said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
El-Massry wrote that she was informed of the summons by her mother, who was visited at around 3 a.m. by an officer from Montaza police station in Alexandria. The officer delivered a notice instructing El-Massry to appear before prosecutors.
“Although the summons was issued on Aug. 14, they chose to terrify my mother by knocking on her door at 3 a.m. to deliver something that could have been handed over in the morning,” El-Massry said in her post.
She added that she had received no information about the reason for the summons. “We’ll see on Monday when we go,” she wrote.
Previous convictions and travel ban
El-Massry, a prominent advocate for civil and political rights, has been imprisoned multiple times between 2008 and 2021 for her activism. In 2014, she was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 50,000 Egyptian pounds for violating Egypt’s protest law after participating in a demonstration on Dec. 2, 2013, in solidarity with the family of Khaled Said as the trial began for the police officers accused of beating him to death. Said's death in police custody in 2010 had sparked widespread protests at the time.
later, her sentence was reduced to six months with labor and the same fine. In September 2014, Alexandria’s Court of Appeals suspended the sentence.
In a separate case, El-Massry was sentenced to one year and three months in prison in December 2015, along with other defendants, for charges including “insulting the Ministry of Interior.” The case stemmed from a protest outside Alexandria's Raml police station in March 2013, during the presidency of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.
In October 2022, Cairo airport authorities informed El-Massry she was banned from travel under an order by the public prosecutor. She had been en route to Venice to attend the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity ceremony, where she was a finalist. The travel restriction was condemned by the award’s organizers at the time.
In November of the same year, El-Massry filed a lawsuit against then-head of the National Elections Authority, Judge Hazem Badawy, after discovering she had been barred from exercising her political rights and voting in the elections.
Her lawyer, Mohamed Ramadan Bibars, told Al Manassa at the time that none of the conditions listed in Egypt’s political rights law applied to her case.
