Police are using technology and ancient laws to imprison gay people. Now human rights campaigners are trying to shift attitudes in Egyptian society

The last time Egyptian engineering student Shady Ragab tried to visit his friend Andrew Medhat in prison, he was turned away.

“We begged them … we just wanted to wish him a happy Easter. They wouldn’t even give him the food we brought to him,” said Ragab, who is Muslim, but had long enjoyed celebrating Christian festivals with his friend. Shady isn’t even sure if Medhat was even informed of the visit. That was a year ago; Ragab hasn’t seen him since. He wells up in tears as he relates the story.

Ragab and Medhat had met at university a few years earlier, building enough trust along with two other friends to open up and discuss their homosexuality together. But in March 2016 Medhat was sentenced to three years in prison for “public debauchery” and prostitution. Earlier that year, he had sent nude photographs of himself to another man on Grindr and had set up a time to meet in Tahrir Square. It was only when he was arrested on the way that he realised that his “date” was in fact an undercover policeman.

Homosexuality is not illegal in Egypt. But in the late 1990s, the police stepped up the use of two old laws – a 1950 anti-prostitution law and a 1961 law against “debauchery” – to arrest and charge the practising LGBT community. The highest-profile action was a raid in Cairo in 2001 on the Queen Boat, a gay-friendly club on the Nile, where 52 men were arrested.

Why LGBT hatred suddenly spiked in Indonesia Read more

At the end of 2013, soon after the ousting of the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi and as the military authors of the coup intensified their grip on power, LGBT campaigners noticed a new, powerful crackdown. The police – who operated hand-in-hand with the military – began a new round of arrests. And this time they were using new techniques.

“The [police] are now more technologically advanced,” says Dalia Abdel Hameed, head of the gender programme at Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), describing their use of apps like Grindr to gather photographic “evidence,” arrange meetings, and entrap men. Medhat’s arrest, detention and imprisonment is remarkably similar to EIPR’s description of a typical process.

Once Medhat was under arrest, the police told his parents that he had taken money and that he had been arrested having sex in a flat, according to Ragab. Both claims allow the police to make a prostitution and debauchery case. He was detained in an underground cell in al-Qasr al Aini police station, five minutes’ walk from Tahrir Square. “The interrogation is the worst part,” says Abdel Hameed.



According to Amr Abdel Rahman, a legal professor at the American University in Cairo and head of the civil liberties programme at EIPR, it is in the detention cells, with less surveillance than in prison itself, that the detainee is particularly vulnerable to both the cellmates and the interrogators. At worst, says Abdel Rahman, scientifically dubious anal examination is made on male detainees in order to produce evidence that they have engaged in homosexual activity – even when the supposed marks of this are often so fresh that it can only be the result of rape within detention.

There are reasons to be cheerful ... LGBTI rights gains in unlikely countries | Peter Tatchell Read more

Legal help and support becomes another cloudy issue. Legal expertise is available from LGBT groups. But the public stigma of the accusation often results in families making a knee-jerk decision to take the most conventional legal option a lawyer recommended by the police. Whether the family supports their child or not, associating with rights organisations can seem too much like a public statement. Abdel Rahman concurs. “If you present yourself in a respectable manner to the families as human rights lawyers, they say to themselves ‘now we are even making the case much harder for our kid’.”

In Medhat’s case, his family chose to take the lawyer recommended by the police. But this legal representation often falls horribly short of what is necessary. EIPR has documented numerous cases in which the police-recommended lawyer, who in Medhat’s case took 2,000EGP (£90) just to look at the case, does not act in the defendant’s best interests. Medhat’s lawyer, contrary to the advice of a lawyer from an LGBT group, advised Medhat to plead guilty to prostitution. The lawyer did not even show up in court. Ragab believes there is a financial arrangement between the police and the lawyers they recommend.

Medhat was found guilty, and began his sentence. Exact figures are hard to come by, but by 2016, the New York Times reported that there were at least 250 incarcerated LGBTQ people. EIPR estimate there may be at least double the number of cases that they manage to fully document in their work. Because the legal interpretation of terms like “debauchery” or “public indecency” is so broad, sentences are often maximised by judges who “stack” similarly-worded offences. This means that LGBTQ people have been sentenced to up to 8 years for a single arrest.

The long-term effect is devastating. “I’ve seen perfectly healthy people go to prison for three years and how they looked coming out of it,” says Reem Shawky, a software specialist and photographer who does not experience a stable gender or sexuality, and who agreed to speak via email about LGBTQ issues. “Something happens that breaks them and they’re never the same again.”

According to Abdel Rahman, the current crackdown is systemic and politicised, in relation to a more general attempt to create order and public legitimacy for the current Egyptian regime. In these circumstances, the LGBTQ community is an easy target.

“In 2013 the regime was kind of unconsciously motivated by an attempt to regain order in the street and in the entire social fabric in the country,” states Abdel Rahman. “[That] means regaining every pillar of power relations in this society, be it in the family, be it in the street, or in the media.”

Abdel Rahman notes that the controversial protest law of November 2013, which limited the ability of Egyptians to engage in public protest, came at the same moment as the first LGBT case that EIPR documented.

Egyptian millennials are far more likely to be accepting of an LGBTQ individual than their parents were Reem Shawky

“I strongly doubt there was a coordination between these two movements,” he says. “But this kind of overlap tells you volumes about the mentality of the backlash … Now it is against the surge of all the [political] odds – the Islamists, ‘immoral’ elements in the streets, the radical left, the youth, the revolution … you name it.”

But beneath the political advantages and the profiteering within the police system, which are fuelling the current backlash, what potential might there be for public attitudes to change?

“Egyptian millennials are far more likely to be accepting of an LGBTQ individual than their parents were,” says Reem Shawky. “Besides, with the rise of issues like global same-sex marriage legalisation … many seem okay with alternative sexualities (although they silently still judge). I don’t know if there’s hope for people changing [now], but there’s hope for coming generations.”

At EIPR, the fight is taken on several levels. Dalia Abdel Hameed says, “I’m not generally the optimistic kind of person, but surely, in my short activism life … I noticed a change. A huge one.” But she and her colleague Abdel Rahman understand that change will be slow. “Yes, [homosexuality] is considered immoral, but it’s not constant and it’s not the same as 10 years ago.”

In the face of slow progress, Abdel Rahman’s focus is more strategic than idealistic. EIPR’s drive now is less towards directly attempting to legitimate LGBT rights, and more towards leveraging a shift in public attitudes towards privacy.

It may seem that the counter-revolutionary backlash, in which the regime reasserted control over all parts of public life, is overwhelming. But one thing has changed. Abdel Rahman notices that Egyptians “detest the violation of people’s privacy ... And this is something that has significantly increased after [the revolution of] 25 January 2011. I mean the perception that there’s actually a space of private matters that shouldn’t be infringed upon by the government and by the media. This is very clear.”

Regardless, Ragab, who is looking forward to moving in with his boyfriend, is impatient for change. “Everybody is fighting right now,” he says. “I am waiting for the day I can announce to the whole world that we are here. We are your friends, your brothers, your sisters, we are in your families. And I am sure that one day I will be doing this. I am not ashamed of my homosexuality, and I will never be.”

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #Dev2030.



