Human rights lawyer, co-founder ECRF and Association of the Families of the Disappeared
"I went to speak about the disappeared. They made me one of them."HuMENA Editorial
Egyptian human rights lawyer detained at Cairo airport in September 2017 while travelling to brief the UN on enforced disappearances. Held in pre-trial detention for over eight years through serial case-rotation.
Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy is a Cairo lawyer who turned to human rights work after his son Amr disappeared during the police violence that followed the 2013 dispersal of Rabaa Square. He co-founded the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) and the Association of the Families of the Disappeared, two of the only Egyptian organisations systematically documenting cases of enforced disappearance and assisting families in their search.
On 10 September 2017, he was stopped at Cairo International Airport on his way to Geneva, where he had been invited to address the 113th session of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Officers from the National Security Agency took him into custody, held him incommunicado for two days, and reportedly tortured him. He was subsequently charged in connection with State Security Case 900/2017 and placed in pre-trial detention at the high-security Tora 2 prison.
For more than seven years he has not been tried. Each time he has approached the legal limit on pre-trial detention, prosecutors have "rotated" him into a new case file with fresh — but substantively identical — accusations: case 1470/2019, then 786/2020, and most recently a third file. His first trial session in any of the three cases finally took place on 1 June 2025, with a second case opening on 11 June. Hearings continue. He has been held throughout in Badr 3 prison, where his family has repeatedly sought, and been denied, a transfer for urgent surgery.
Now 61, he remains in pre-trial detention in Badr 3 with multiple untreated medical conditions. In August 2025 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressly called for the release of all Egyptian detainees held beyond statutory pre-trial limits and named him among them. The Egyptian government has not responded. His case has become emblematic of the practice of "rotation" — the indefinite holding of dissidents through serial recycling of identical charges.
This case file was compiled by HuMENA's Egypt research team from primary documentation, public filings, family-supplied legal documents, and confidential partner reporting. Editorial responsibility rests with the HuMENA Editorial Board. Where dates or facts are uncertain, the record errs on the side of the source material and notes uncertainty in the live archive at humena.org.
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