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At least six children and perhaps several times that number were among those arrested on March 21, 2003. Human Rights Watch attended the detention renewal hearing of one child, and interviewed adult detainees, lawyers, and activists who spoke with other detained children. Based on these interviews, we believe that Egyptian state security personnel and police tortured at least three children, and subjected several more to beatings, ill-treatment, and detention in unsafe circumstances. Human Rights Watch has previously documented a pattern of police torture and ill-treatment of children as young as nine in Egypt.96
While some children may have been participating in demonstrations at the time of their arrests, at least two children were targeted for beatings or arrest simply because they stopped to watch. Gamal `Eid told Human Rights Watch that when he was held at al-Darassa,
a young boy came to me and said, “Please, make them send me home. I didn’t do anything. I was only going to get a Mothers’ Day gift.” He was about thirteen years old. After that we were sitting around talking about our arrests and another boy came and said, “I was on the 6th of October Bridge [which overlooks the Bar Association and al-Tahrir Square] watching [the demonstration] when a police officer came and started hitting the kids who were watching. We ran away, but when we saw that he was alone we [came back and] threw bricks at him. Then a lot of other police and officers came and arrested us and brought us here.” I asked him how old he was and he said he was fourteen. There was also a third boy, who looked about twelve or thirteen, but he was sleeping so I didn’t talk to him.97
Gamal `Eid told Human Rights Watch that on Sunday, March 23, 2003 he shared an overcrowded cell at al-Khalifa police station with two boys who said they had been tortured by state security officers on the ground floor at the SSI headquarters in Lazoghli.
They heard I was a lawyer and wanted legal advice. One was a sixteen-year-old. He said at Lazoghli the officers hit him while telling him, “You are the one who burned the vehicle, just say you did it.” When he didn’t confess, they shocked him with electricity. He showed me the marks on his hands, red marks with a slight swelling. He said they tortured him for a day and a half, and he said there were other kids with him, younger kids, who were also beaten and shocked, but his torture was the worst. One of those other boys was with us, also in the cell, a boy about fourteen or fifteen. He was very scared. He said the state security officers kept saying, “Who was with you? Say who was with you,” and so in the end he gave them names of three boys from his neighborhood that he didn’t like, just so that the torture would stop.98
`Eid and Manal Khalid told Human Rights Watch that they each saw police curse and beat a sixteen-year-old girl who seemed to them psychologically unbalanced. `Eid described the girl’s arrest on March 21:
While we were [being held in the back of a police truck outside the Bar Association] plainclothes police dragged over a girl and picked her up and threw her into the back of the pickup with us. They were cursing her with filthy language, calling her “whore” and “bastard”. She kept begging them to give her back one of her shoes that had fallen off, but they just kept telling her to shut up. I spoke to her to calm her down, and realized that she was young, maybe sixteen, and told the police, “This is a minor.” Ziyad [al-`Ulaimi] told them the same thing, but they didn’t listen, and the girl didn’t understand that it was important. She seemed to not understand anything about what was happening. She just wanted to know where the police were going to take her, but the police wouldn’t say.99
Despite evidence that the girl was a juvenile who should not be detained with adults, she was held with women detainees, first at al-Darassa and then at al-Khalifa and al-Azbakiyya police stations. At al-Khalifa she was beaten along with other detainees, and at al-Azbakiyya she was beaten and subjected to sexual abuse. Manal Khalid, who was detained with her from March 21 to March 23, told Human Rights Watch.
At first they treated her like the rest of us, and beat her when they beat us at al-Khalifa police station. When the police found out that she wasn’t one of the protestors they began treating her like a criminal prisoner. At al-Azbakiyya police lockup an officer [name withheld] called her out because she had given a false name at the beginning. She had said she was a law student, although it was clear that she was a girl from a simple family. When they brought her back she was crying. She said that an officer [name withheld] molested her—that he used bad language and slapped her and kicked her and touched her [sexually]. It was hard to get information from her because she was clearly unbalanced. After that they charged her with giving false information and moved her to the juvenile section of al-Azbakiyya police station.100
In each case involving a child that Human Rights Watch investigated, the child was held with unrelated adults, in situations that placed them at extreme risk of abuse. Such detention is prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.101
Gamal `Eid described the conditions for children held in severely crowded cells with other adults at al-Darassa Central Security Camp on March 21 and the al-Khalifa police station on March 23.
At al-Khalifa the cell was only about four meters by two and one half meters. We were about thirty-four detainees, including the two boys, so it was crowded, with not enough space to lie down. There was one toilet without a door in the cell, and almost no ventilation. At al-Darassa we were in a room about four or five meters by nine meters with only two or three small, mesh covered windows that opened onto a wall and didn’t give enough air. We were about seventy-two people there, including three boys all under fifteen. I was at al-Darassa from about 8 or 9 p.m. until about 6 a.m. During that time a guard came and said, “If you want to eat you have to pay,” and was trying to sell us eggs, ta`miya, and cheese. I told the others not to pay because it is our right as detainees to be fed, but everyone was hungry so some people with money paid anyway. I complained to the guard and later an officer came and spoke to me, and then the guard returned with bread, cheese, and halawa. It wasn’t enough for the number of people, but because some had already paid for food it was enough for everyone to eat something.102
96 Egyptian authorities routinely detain children with adults, exposing them to serious human rights violations at the hands of adult criminal detainees and police, including sexual abuse and violence, police beatings, and violence by other detainees. Extremely poor conditions in adult police lockups, including overcrowding and the denial of basic necessities such as food, medical care, and bedding, often are so severe as to endanger children’s health and well-being and in many cases directly contribute to the likelihood that children will be subjected to extortion, exploitation, and violence by police or other detainees. See Human Rights Watch, “Charged with Being Children: Egyptian Police Abuse of Children in Need of Protection,” A Human Rights Watch Report, vol. 15, no. 1(E), February 2003.
97 Human Rights Watch interview with Gamal `Abd al-`Aziz `Eid, May 17, 2003.
98 Human Rights Watch interview with Gamal `Abd al-`Aziz `Eid, May 17, 2003.
99 Human Rights Watch interview with Gamal `Abd al-`Aziz `Eid, May 17, 2003.
100 Human Rights Watch interview with Manal Khalid, April 1, 2003, and telephone interview, May 21, 2003. Human Rights Watch has on file the officers named by Manal Khalid.
101 The Convention on the Rights of the Child requires children deprived of their liberty to be separated from adults “unless it is in the child’s best interest not to do so”; the ICCPR prohibition has no such exception. SeeConvention on the Rights of the Child, adopted November 20, 1989, G.A. Res. 44/25, U.N. Doc. A/RES/44/25 (entered into force September 2, 1990), article 37(c); and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted December 16, 1966, G.A. Res. 2200A (XXI), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force March 23, 1976), article 10(b).
102 Human Rights Watch interview with Gamal `Abd al-`Aziz `Eid, May 17, 2003.
