Human rights abuses against women prisoners in Egypt
The independent, non-governmental organisation “Human Rights Watch” has documented and published reports on its website regarding violence against women in Egypt, in which they maintain that women in custody are subjected to official mistreatment that ranges from humiliation to torture.
Women held overnight in pre-trial detention at police lockups, often with no access to legal representation and without being officially charged, are in many ways the most vulnerable to physical and sexual assault because they are invisible in the criminal justice system. Many times, no official, apart from the arresting officers, even knows that the women are being held.
Women in Egypt are incarcerated for numerous reasons, some of which violate international human rights law. Many are arrested as a result of either discriminatory laws, or the discriminatory application of laws. For example, laws based on the Koran criminalise sex outside of marriage but are discriminatory in application, as they are routinely applied to the victims of rape.
It has even been reported that the majority of women in some Middle-Eastern prisons are there because they were victims of rapes in which the perpetrators were set free while the women themselves were found guilty – because there were not four male witnesses as required by the Koran. A woman who reports rape is, in effect, already “confessing” to unlawful intercourse, should her accusation not be believed or proved under criminal laws. So, women in Muslim countries find rape extremely difficult to prove under criminal laws that simultaneously set a high standard of proof for rape and undervalue women’s testimony as witnesses or victims.
In Egypt, internal security forces have detained female family members of suspected militants who are wanted by the authorities, in order to force the militants to turn themselves in. These detentions, themselves in violation of international human rights standards, are frequently accompanied by threats of sexual and physical abuse. These threats are used to compel the men in hiding to give themselves up, in exchange for the release of their female family members. The threat of rape and actual sexual mistreatment of women are perceived in Egypt to be profound offences against a woman’s individual honour, as well as the honour of her family and male relatives.
Once imprisoned, both male and female prisoners suffer violence at the hands of abusive guards but male jailers often abuse women prisoners for different reasons. Often, because male guards bring to their jobs discriminatory attitudes about male dominance and female submissiveness, women prisoners are punished for not meeting their male guards’ expectations about female behaviour. In other cases, the mistreatment of women in detention appears to target their sexuality in a deliberate attempt to degrade them and, by extension, their male family members. It was found that Egyptian security forces, for instance, have compelled female relatives of suspected militants to strip naked, and then placed them in a closed room with naked male detainees in an effort to degrade them.
Women who are mistreated, threatened and harassed while in custody often find that reporting such abuse does no good, and may even lead to retaliation. In numerous cases that have been investigated, prison officials will take the word of a guard over that of the prisoner, even with plain evidence to the contrary. This failure to provide an impartial grievance mechanism denies prisoners their right to due process and condones the guards’ behaviour.
In particular, the State Security Investigation (SS), the internal security apparatus attached to the Ministry of Interior, has been permitted to operate in a lawless manner. Lawyers interviewed by Human Rights Watch expressed frustration at the inaction of prosecutors in the face of such abuses, arguing that there is no effective oversight of police and security forces’ conduct. Prison guards who have been found guilty of assault are rarely fired or criminally prosecuted. Rather, they may be allowed to resign or transfer to another prison facility; neither form of punishment limits the officers’ ability to work in a supervisory position over other female prisoners.
When confronted with documentation of widespread violence against women in custody in their countries, governments have often denied or ignored the role of state agents, or accused the women prisoners of lying about their ordeals. In Egypt, the government has denied any detention of innocent citizens and ignored allegations of sexual assault and mistreatment, or it has characterized the allegations as attempts by militants to slander the government. http://www.hrw.org/women/custody.html
