Lawyer Who Worked for Egypt’s Disappeared Himself Vanishes
Officials and pro-government media outlets attacked Human Rights Watch, which responded by making copies of the report available via websites
that the Egyptian government has not blocked.. Mr. Hegazy’s case has greater resonance for its ties to the case of Giulio Regeni, an Italian student whose battered body was found in Cairo in February 2016, nine days after he disappeared, leading to a diplomatic furor with Italy that still dominates relations between the countries.
The harassment of human rights activists is common in Cairo,
but Mr. Hegazy’s case comes at a delicate moment for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, whose notoriously poor human rights record has come under intensified international scrutiny of late and even earned him a rare punishment from the United States.
Human rights activists have frequently been harassed by the Egyptian authorities, and Human Rights Watch issued a report just last week
that accused the police and security forces of torture and other abuses.
13, 2017
CAIRO — For years Ebrahim Metwally Hegazy, an Egyptian human rights lawyer, documented the plight
of Egyptians who vanished into the hidden recesses of his country’s powerful security apparatus.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni of Italy said the Regeni investigation remained "a duty of the state." Many Egyptians who have taken up the Regeni
case — as well as the cases of hundreds of Egyptians who have also disappeared in recent years — have suffered harassment or been otherwise silenced.
Mr. Hegazy helped to investigate the circumstances of Mr. Regeni’s death, said Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights
and Freedoms, which is representing the Regeni family in Egypt.