Ibrahim Halawa was jailed during military crackdown in Egypt after protests against overthrow of former president Mohamed Morsi

Irish man to campaign for prisoners abroad after four years in Egyptian jail

An Irish man jailed for four years in Egypt has vowed to work for other people incarcerated overseas after he returned to Dublin on Tuesday.

Ibrahim Halawa was 17 when he was arrested while on holiday in Cairo, after becoming caught up in protests over the removal of the then Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi.

He was freed late last week, about a month after he was acquitted of all charges relating to the protest.

Speaking after an emotional reunion with family, friends and supporters after flying into Dublin airport, Halawa said: “I need to get some medical checks. I’m going to take some time off, my mum is sick, so I’ll be taking some time by her side.”

“I have left a lot of cellmates behind. There’s a lot of innocent people behind bars around the world, not just in Egypt.”

Halawa added that his experience of incarceration abroad has made him want to work for Irish prisoners overseas.

“Even if they are criminals or if they have been convicted I’m going to be asking for them to come back to do their time in Ireland,” he said. “I felt how it is to be away from home.”

Halawa’s family, human rights groups, Irish politicians and the Department of Foreign Affairs have spent four years in a protracted legal battle to have him freed.

Halawa, the son of prominent Dublin Muslim cleric Sheikh Hussein Halawa, was a student at the time of the mass arrests in the Egyptian capital. His three sisters, Somaia, Fatima and Omaima, were also arrested, but later released on bail and returned to Dublin. They were acquitted following trial in absentia.

In a September 2016 article for the Guardian, Halawa described conditions in Egyptian jails.

“Each time you are transferred to a new prison, there is something called ‘the party’, he wrote. “They show you who’s boss. In most cases it’s beatings, but in one, we were stripped, told to lie down facing the ground with our arms behind our back, and they started to jump on our backs, from one prisoner to the next.



I'm in an Egyptian prison – being stripped and beaten is normal | Ibrahim Halawa Read more

“It’s normal to be cursed, stripped naked, beaten with a bar, or put in solitary confinement or the ‘tank. (a pitch-black 3.5m x 5.5m cell). They might also torture another prisoner in front of you. Of course you never forget. Ever.”



Omaima Halawa said her brother would return to new nieces and nephews he had not seen before. “He hasn’t seen my dad for four years, and we haven’t seen him for four years,” she said. “All these questions that you used to know about your brother, you’re going to be learning them again.”

Halawa had undertaken a series of hunger strikes in protest against his detention, and at one stage he became so weak that he used a wheelchair, his family has said.

Maya Foa, director of the charity Reprieve, which has campaigned for Halawa’s freedom, said he had been through a hellish ordeal.

“His release and return home to Ireland is long overdue,” Foa said. “Ibrahim’s ordeal has shone a light on the gross abuses perpetrated by the Egyptian regime – including the use of mass trials, torture and the death penalty for children and non-violent protesters. Ireland and the international community should call on Egypt to end these abuses.”

Foa pointed out that Egypt has handed down thousands of death sentences in mass trials since protests in 2013.

Sinn Féin MEP Lynn Boylan, one of the Irish politicians who worked to secure Halawa’s release, told Irish broadcaster RTÉ that while he was excited about coming home, “there will be difficult days ahead as well when he comes to terms with the fact that he has lost out on those four years”.



Halawa said he wanted to get his “life straight” and added that he was looking forward to a plate of fish and chips.

Press Association contributed to this report