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Egypt The Penal System
Prison administration was under the jurisdiction of the
Ministry of Interior. Prison officials were usually graduates of
police or military schools. The main categories of penal
institutions were penitentiaries, general prisons, district jails,
and juvenile reformatories. Criminals receiving heavy sentences
were sent to penitentiaries where they faced hard labor and strict
discipline. Penitentiaries could subject prisoners to solitary
confinement only as a disciplinary measure for bad behavior.
General prisons housed offenders who were sentenced to more than
three months. District jails usually housed prisoners who were
sentenced for up to three months. Village police stations had jail
facilities that they used only for temporary incarceration. As of
the mid-1980s, Egypt had three major penitentiaries and
twenty-seven general prisons.
After the 1952 Revolution, Egypt implemented some reforms in
the quality of penal administration. The government built hospitals
in major prisons and provided separate facilities for women.
Prisons adopted the concept of rehabilitation; juvenile prisoners
received special attention; and, in cases of need, provision was
made for assisting a prisoner's family.
Egyptian prisons were overcrowded; facilities designed to hold
fewer than 20,000 prisoners housed about 30,000. Most of the
prisons were built in the early twentieth century and needed
complete renovation or replacement. Six prisons were under
construction in 1988 in nonresidential areas, where space was
available for farming and dairying by convict laborers.
According to the United States Department of State's Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1987, prison conditions
and treatment varied considerably. Some institutions lacked
adequate medical and sanitary facilities. Tora Prison near Cairo,
where convicted members of Al Jihad were incarcerated, had a
particularly bad reputation. Other prisons provided better living
conditions and offered inmates recreational programs and vocational
training. In its 1987 report, the Arab Human Rights Organization
criticized what it termed "supervision" of the prison system by
officers of the GDSSI.
In an interview appearing in a Cairo newspaper in August 1988,
then Minister of Interior Zaki Badr acknowledged that "conditions
inside the prisons are terrible . . . the prisons are a hotbed of
drug and monetary crimes . . . even more so among the guards
themselves." He said that the penal system planned to implement
modern methods of prison security, improve communication systems
among guards, and install electronic closed-circuit television
monitoring systems and special measures to ensure efficiency and
discipline among prison officers and guards.
According to the 1988 report of the human rights organization
Amnesty International, there were many allegations of torture and
poor-treatment of detainees, particularly in parts of the Tora
Prison complex. Torture was apparently inflicted to obtain
confessions in 1987 after a series of assassination attempts
against high officials. Egypt has refused to allow representatives
from groups such as the Arab Human Rights Organization and the
International Red Cross to inspect the country's prisons and meet
with prisoners. Members of the People's Assembly who represented
opposition parties were also refused access to the prisons. A
report by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights in early 1990
claimed that there was a marked increase in the use of torture in
1989, not only against members of subversive organizations but also
against ordinary citizens with no political affiliations. Muhammad
Abd al Halim Musa replaced Badr as minister of interior in January
1990. Badr had long been criticized for harsh repression of Islamic
extremists and violations of civil liberties. Egyptian human rights
activists hoped that his successor would adopt more moderate
policies and improve the treatment of prisoners.
* * *
A number of articles on the modern role, mission, and equipment
of the Egyptian armed forces are included in the December 1989
issue of Defense and Foreign Affairs under the heading
"Defense in Egypt." Additional material, some of it no longer
current, can be found in the article on Egypt by Gwynne Dyer and
John Keegan in the compendium World Armies. In Fighting
Armies, G.P. Armstrong summarizes Egypt's military doctrine,
fighting qualities, and perception of national security. Trevor N.
Dupuy's Elusive Victory evaluates the performance of the
Egyptian armed forces in the successive wars with Israel. The
Military Balance, 1989-1990, published by the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in London, provides the most
reliable data on current force strengths and weapons.
Robert Springborg's Mubarak's Egypt assesses the
influence of Abu Ghazala on the Egyptian armed forces during the
1980s and the importance of the new military-operated production
enterprises. Contrasting interpretations of the status of the
military under Mubarak are presented by Robert B. Satloff in
Army and Politics in Mubarak's Egypt and by Ahmed Abdallah
in an article, "The Armed Forces and the Democratic Process in
Egypt," in Third World Quarterly. In Egyptian Politics
under Sadat, Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Jr. provides an account of
the depoliticization of the military during the 1970s. The criminal
justice system, the application of the Emergency Law, and prison
conditions are appraised in the United States Department of State's
annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The
significance of the Islamic activist movement as a potential threat
to internal security has been analyzed in numerous studies,
including Springborg's book previously mentioned, an article by
former United States Ambassador to Egypt Hermann Frederick Eilts,
"Egypt in 1986," in the Washington Quarterly, an article by
Yahya Sadowski, "Egypt's Islamist Movement: A New Political and
Economic Force," in Middle East Insight, and the book by
Thomas W. Lippman, Egypt after Nasser. A brief commentary by
Lillian Craig Harris in Middle East International is notable
for its conclusion that the threat to the political system by
religious zealotry remains remote. (For further information and
complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1990
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