Beltagy’s wife highlights Egypt’s human rights abuses

The wife of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Beltagy yesterday visited the Spanish embassy in the Turkish capital Ankara and delivered two letters on the condition of human rights abuses in Egypt.

Human Rights Monitor (HRM) said in a statement that Sanaa Abdul-Jawwad and a delegation that included members of the organisation and the UK-based Arab Organisation for Human Rights visited the Spanish Embassy in Ankara as part of a tour to a number of Western embassies to brief them on human rights violations in Egypt including the use of the death penalty, and the increase in cases of enforced disappearances, torture, arbitrary detention and poor conditions of detention.

The chief of Egypt section in the Arab Organization for Human Rights, Azab Mustafa has pointed to the collapse of the justice system in Egypt which is reflected in the rise of death sentences to reach 770 sentences including 52 sentences issued by military trials.

Head of HRW Egypt, Salma Ashraf, said: “Repression in Egypt has risen to include large segments of Egyptians, where more than 80,000 Egyptians have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, in addition to the increasing number of torture and enforced disappearance cases.”

Following the murder of his daughter Asmaa in 2013 during the dispersal of the Rabaa Al-Adawiya sit-in, Beltagy was arrested and held in solitary confinement until today.

The Egyptian judiciary sentenced him to more than 220 years in prison and to the death penalty which has recently been repealed by the Court of Cassation.