First Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP)
Prosecutor Mohammed el-Garf took part in the unlawful prosecution of many defendants for their peaceful speech and activism, which are protected by international human rights law, and has also violated Egyptian law human rights protections.
In October 2018, El-Garf charged Walid Shawky with serious crimes stemming from his peaceful political activism and ordered him into pretrial detention – without presenting any evidence of such crimes or that the statutory conditions for pretrial detention had been met.
He also declined to register the date of Shawky's arrest as October 14, 2018, and instead registered it as of October 20, 2018, effectively erasing a week of enforced disappearance and mistreatment from the case records, even though Shawky told el-Garf about the actual date of his arrest.
Almost two years later, el-Garf erased from the record an additional episode of forced disappearance, between September 2, 2020 and October 6, 2020, when he falsely registered Shawky's date of arrest as October 6, even though Shawky's family had notified the General Prosecutor that security officials had forcibly disappeared Shawky in September.
When the statutory limitation for Shawky's pretrial detention expired, Prosecutor el-Garf rotated Shawky to a new case, No. 880/2020, and brought nearly the same charges that he brought two years earlier, again ordering him into pretrial detention without presenting any evidence to justify the charges or the pretrial detention.
In doing so, he again prosecuted Shawky for peaceful speech and activities protected by international law and also violated an Egyptian law requirement to terminate prosecution if the charges are unfounded. One of the so-called new charges was that Shawky had participated in a demonstration – during the time when security officers were holding him in a secret detention facility.
El-Garf is also the subject of an October 9, 2019 complaint (No. 13400/2019) by The Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) submitted to the Prosecutor General Office and the Public Prosecution Inspection Administration, claiming that he prevented the lawyer of activist Mohamed Oxygen from attending his client's court session.
See the Walid Shawky case.
DAWN contacted the office of Egypt's Prosecutor General on January 7, 2021 to get a response from el-Garf to what it is published. DAWN has not received any response.
