Patrick George Zaki has been accused of disseminating false news about the country’s internal conditions to disturb security and social peace. His case is emblematic of the large-scale crackdown by the Abdel Fattah el-Sisi government on rights and freedoms in Egypt

Zaki was arrested in February 2020 after returning to Egypt from Italy where he was studying at the University of Bologna. He has since spent 22 months in pre-trial detention on various charges

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US president Joe Biden had said during his presidential campaign last year that there will be no more “blank checks for Trump’s favorite dictator,” referring to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

Alia Mosallam, an Egyptian historian and a postdoctoral fellow at Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Berlin, was detained for over 17 hours at the airport upon arrival before being released on bail

Ahmed Samir Santawy, a student of the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, was detained by the police in Cairo on February 1, leading to an international outcry

Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student at Cambridge University, was kidnapped on January 25, 2016 from Cairo. His body was found a few days later with torture marks. He had been working on Egyptian trade unions for his dissertation 

A criminal court in Cairo revoked its own order for the release of Alaa Abdel Fattah and two other activists. Alaa Abdel Fattah, one of the prominent faces of the 2011 uprising against the Hosni Mubarak regime, has been in jail for nearly 6 years since 2013

We also report on the arrest of Patrick George Zaki, an Egyptian human rights activist as well as the ongoing protests in Lebanon that have rejected the new cabinet of prime minister Hasan Diab and his economic reforms.

Zaki’s lawyers claimed that during those 24 hours of disappearance he was brutally beaten and tortured in the police custody.