Eleven human rights groups and dozens of public figures have called on Egypt’s National Council for Human Rights to urgently intervene and secure the release of detained activist and translator Marwa Arafa, whose health is in serious decline.
In their joint statement, the signatories warned that Arafa's health condition may become life-threatening, and urged authorities to release her pending trial “to preserve her right to life and dignity.”
The statement follows an emergency motion filed two days earlier by Arafa’s defense team during a hearing at the First Terrorism Circuit of the Cairo Criminal Court.
Her lawyers requested an immediate hospital transfer, citing visible signs of severe exhaustion. “She was struggling to breathe, her face pale and drained,” said her lawyer, Mokhtar Mounir, in comments to Al Manassa.
Beyond her deteriorating health, the statement drew attention to the compounded impact on Arafa’s daughter who is on the autism spectrum, describing her prolonged separation from her mother as “an additional punishment that affects not just the detainee, but her entire family.”
Arafa was arrested on 20 April 2020 after Egyptian security forces stormed her home and disappeared her to an unknown location, according to the statement. She surfaced two weeks later before the State Security Prosecution, which charged her with “joining a terrorist group and committing a financing-related offense.” Authorities ordered her into pretrial detention without investigating her family’s reports of her enforced disappearance.
Arafa was interrogated only once, on the day of her reappearance, before her detention was extended automatically, and unlawfully, for more than five years without further investigation. She was referred to trial earlier this year.
Arafa’s continued imprisonment exceeds the legal two-year limit for pretrial detention, in direct violation of Article 143 of Egypt’s Code of Criminal Procedures that sets a maximum legal limit of two years for pre-trial detention. “Her ongoing detention flouts the most basic guarantees of justice set out in the law,” the statement said.
The joint appeal for Marwa Arafa's amnesty on medical and legal grounds comes amid wider appeals by human rights groups against prolonged pretrial detention.
Signatories include the Regional Coalition for Women Human Rights Defenders in Southwest Asia and North Africa and the New Woman Foundation.