Restrictions: Travel Ban |
Hisham Gaafar is the director of the Mada Foundation for Media Development and a member of the Journalists’ Syndicate. He was arrested when security forces stormed the headquarters of Mada on 21 October 2015. He was interrogated by the state security prosecution and his lawyers were barred from attending the interrogation. He was accused of receiving illegal foreign funding and belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.
He spent most of his time in al-Aqrab/Scorpion section, the maximum-security wing of the Tora prison compound. In May 2017, a court listed Gaafar on a terrorism list. In December 2018, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that his deprivation of liberty was arbitrary and requested his immediate release. He suffers from many health problems which severely deteriorated during detention due to medical neglect and being kept in solitary confinement.
On 26 March 2019, Cairo Criminal Court ordered his release with precautionary measures, after more than three years in pre-trial detention (which greatly exceeds the maximum period of two years allowed by the law). He finally returned home late at night on 6 April. The conditions for his release initially stipulated that he had to spend three hours twice a week in the police station, but this was changed to two hours once a week on 11 May.
His spouse, Dr Manar Tantawy, suffered the consequences of Mr Gaafar’s detention. The Disciplinary Board of the Higher Technological Institute, where she used to work as an assistant professor, undertook disciplinary procedures against her, one of them because she participated in a satellite channel in which she called for the release of her husband. Since 2021, she has been denied the right to obtain her academic degree and to head the department of mechanical engineering because she is the wife of a former political prisoner. On 20 December 2023, she has been finally acquitted of the accusations held against her from the disciplinary board.