Young Egyptian man imprisoned for protesting torture released after 2 years

A young man who had been behind bars for more than two years for challenging government-sanctioned torture in Egypt was released on bail early Friday morning.

Mahmoud Hussein, now 20, was arrested at the age of 18 in 2014 after being stopped at a checkpoint on his way home from a peaceful protest commemorating the third anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which ousted longtime President Hosni Mubarak. At the time, Hussein was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Nation Without Torture” and a protest scarf.

Egyptian authorities held Hussein, who lives in the northeast Cairo neighborhood of El-Marg, in pre-trial detention on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group and attending an unauthorized protest, among other charges.

Human rights advocates have been campaigning for Hussein’s release, saying that he was tortured into confessing to trumped-up charges.

Nadine Haddad, the Egypt campaigner at Amnesty International, and Wade H. McMullen Jr., a staff attorney for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, who were heavily involved in campaigning for Hussein’s release, spoke to Yahoo News Friday about their argument that his incarceration is symptomatic of Egypt’s deeply flawed justice system.

“The fact that the authorities arrested him in the first place, tortured him, tried to get him to falsely confess to these crimes and kept him in detention for so long despite growing public pressure to release him,” McMullen said in an interview, “just shows the lengths to which the Egyptian government is willing to go to silence any form of dissent, whether it be a journalist or a young activist.”

Haddad said pretrial detention in Egypt is supposed be used only in exceptional circumstances but that the government resorts to this extreme measure over and over again in its broad crackdown on dissidents of any sort.

“There are at least 700 people being held in just two cases on pretrial detention,” Haddad said in an interview with Yahoo News. “We obviously decided to work on the case because it was such a clear-cut case of injustice. It highlighted the flaws in the criminal justice system in Egypt.”

Amnesty International collected nearly 145,000 signatures calling for his release from all over the world and delivered them to Egyptian authorities last November.

That same month, RFK Center filed a case before the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in an attempt to secure his release. The organization said Hussein was beaten for at least four hours and given electric shocks to the back, hands and testicles. Under duress, the group continued, he was forced to confess to belonging to a terrorist group, possessing Molotov cocktails and hand grenades and protesting without permission.

Both organizations have been active in raising the profile of Hussein’s case as a violation of international law and putting public and diplomatic pressure on the Egyptians. Mahmoud’s brother Tarek has also been heavily involved in the campaign for his release.

“Finally that tireless campaign paid off when on Tuesday he had a court session, which happen every 45 days to decide whether to release Mahmoud or to renew his detention,” Haddad said. “On this particular session, quite unexpectedly actually, the judge ordered his release.”

The public prosecutor appealed that decision the following day but on Thursday the court finalized Thursday his release on bail. He was finally reunited with his family at 1 a.m. Friday in Cairo.

“His freedom has been way overdue,” Haddad said. “And he should just now be able to get on with his life as a 20-year-old young man.”