× Expand Hassan Ammar/AP Photo Egyptian security forces outside Cairo’s Tora Prison in 2015

Sheltering at home like much of the world, French citizen Céline Lebrun-Shaath learned on Saturday that her husband Ramy Shaath had been declared an enemy of the Egyptian state. Added to the country’s list of terrorists, his assets are frozen, passport seized, and he’ll be placed on a travel ban for five years.

The government of Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s military president, had targeted both Lebrun-Shaath and her husband last July; Lebrun-Shaath was deported to France and her husband, who is Palestinian-Egyptian and suffers from high cholesterol, has since been held in Egyptian prison awaiting trial for undeclared charges. The news was a shock for Lebrun-Shaath, who has been tirelessly advocating for the release of her husband and other prisoners as the pandemic spreads.

With notoriously poor facilities crammed full of inmates, prisons in the Middle East and North Africa were already dangerous, but the arrival of COVID-19 is turning them into a widespread, arbitrary death sentence. But rather than mitigate this impending health crisis, Shaath’s case illustrates how the United States’ closest allies in the Arab world are seizing the opportunity to crack down. By and large, the global attention on the pandemic has provided cover for continued repression.

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Authoritarian regimes have used imprisonment to quash potential threats to power, with broad crackdowns in the region over the past years. No precise figure exists for the number of political prisoners currently held, but human rights monitors track the unjust arrests of state critics in the United Arab Emirates, journalists exposing corruption in Turkey, and human rights lawyers in Egypt. Even those who merely express religious, sexual, or other difference have been subject to arbitrary detention. U.S. citizens are not exempt: At least four Americans have been unfairly detained in Egypt, three in Saudi Arabia, and many others in Syria, Iran, and Turkey.

The Trump administration has a legal responsibility to ensure the health and safety of any American imprisoned, and to secure the release of Americans held unjustly. “We know that the Trump administration [has] brought many Americans home, and we are very encouraged by that. But with regard to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, their response has been uneven,” said Margaux Ewen, executive director of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation. There have been a few successes, like Amer Fakhoury, a U.S. citizen accused of torture in Lebanon, who was returned to the States on March 19. But while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has released public statements calling for the release of Americans from Venezuela and Iran, the administration hasn’t done so for those detained elsewhere.

Family handout Palestinian-Egyptian activist Ramy Shaath

Americans and foreign nationals—violent and nonviolent offenders alike—are held in dire conditions across the region and suffer from abuse and torture, a lack of or inconsistent medical care, overcrowding, and deteriorating facilities. Human rights and humanitarian organizations are rarely granted entry, and information about conditions has become even more limited as many prisons have suspended visits, a measure intended to limit the spread of the disease into and out of the prisons. But this lack of access to information has become a major concern as alternative measures have not been put in place. “Ramy has been denied any communication with both his lawyers and his family” due to the new regulations, said Shaath's family, who discovered her husband’s recent charges in an online article. “At the moment, we cannot know how Ramy is doing.” The International Committee of the Red Cross and other international nongovernmental organizations have emphasized the importance of communication when visits are restricted: “The ICRC encourages the authorities to ensure regular and transparent communication with detainees and their families on the reasons, the modalities and the duration of the restrictions implemented.”

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Some countries have taken other precautionary steps to free prisoners even while suppressing critics. Morocco has ordered release of 5,654 inmates, Algeria has released or pardoned 15,000 since February, and Iran’s prisoner releases have surpassed 85,000. But political prisoners are generally exempted from releases, governments in the region have pursued further punishment for political prisoners, and arrests continue. Saudi Arabia has advanced an ongoing campaign of mass detention of political opponents, with hundreds arrested in March. In Algeria, journalists have been detained in what one independent media group called the “worst period of repression of press freedom since the assassination of journalists in the 1990s.” Bahrain earned some praise for releasing 300 political prisoners but subsequently placed a journalist in solitary confinement after he reported on the country’s response to the pandemic in prison. And, along with Shaath, the Egyptian public prosecutor added 11 others to the country’s terrorism list.

A broad definition of terrorism that implicates nearly any critical political activity as a crime against national security is a mainstay of the region’s counterterrorism laws, and most of the region’s releases have excluded those who face or may face terrorism charges. This exclusion has a public-safety justification—after the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, for instance, thousands of prisoners held in administrative detention were released, some of whom were hardened jihadists who then went on to carry out attacks against police, military, and civilians. But in a region in which nearly every country has seen recent anti-regime protests, the same charges can be pursued against someone who has bombed a church as someone who has blogged against state corruption. In some instances, nonviolent activists are grouped in the same case as those who have committed heinous acts of violence. For this reason, local rights groups and international organizations have advocated for releases based on guidelines that ensure protection of rights and safety for prisoners and society at large. The World Health Organization and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued guidance recommending immediate release of any who have been arbitrarily detained, and prioritization of those with underlying health conditions, low-risk profiles, and children.

Thus far, little international pressure has been applied toward implementation of these guidelines. “What’s frustrating is the amount of leverage that the United States government has that it actively chooses not to use with its allies,” said Mohamed Soltan, a former political prisoner in Egypt and founder of the Freedom Initiative, who pointed to the strong ties in security cooperation and financial aid to the region. (Egypt and Jordan are currently the second- and third-highest recipients of United States military assistance, with Israel as the first.) “The passive role that the U.S. has played with governments like Egypt, Saudi, and the UAE has made it so that they are able to get away with murder,” Soltan added. He referenced the case of Mustafa Kassem, an American citizen who died of medical neglect this January in the same prison where Soltan was held. A press conference at the time saw a group of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle call on Pompeo to apply sanctions or use other punitive measures to send a message to Cairo; although Pompeo lamented Kassem’s death as “pointless and tragic,” no concrete action was taken.

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With Pompeo quiet, Congress has again stepped into the fray. On April 10, a bipartisan group of 15 senators led by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) called on the secretary of state to push for the release of Americans and political prisoners unjustly detained anywhere in the world, explicitly naming prisoners in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt. The letter acknowledges that “authoritarian regimes around the world continue to detain tens of thousands of political prisoners in the middle of this pandemic,” even where releases occur. The senators describe a “global fight” against COVID-19, a transnational aspect worth noting: The virus cannot be contained by prison walls or by state borders, and its spread in the region’s prisons is both a critical rights issue for those detained and constitutes a global threat to public health. Governments often use Ramadan, the holy month which begins at the end of this week, to pardon or release prisoners. The U.S. administration has seen the pandemic as a chance to pressure opponents like Iran, but by failing to speak out on acts of repression from allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it gives a nod of approval to these actions. With the coronavirus looming in the region’s prisons, this silence may mean assent to death sentences for peaceful activists like Ramy Shaath.