On Monday, 22 September 2025, the first hearing of the trial of human rights lawyer and coordinator of the Association of the Families of the Forcibly Disappeared, Ibrahim Metwally, took place. The trial is based on Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP) Case No. 786/2020, his third simultaneous trial on similar charges – and the third in which neither nor Ibrahim nor his legal defence were presented with any evidence or witnesses. Those trials follow eight years that he had already spent in pretrial detention, in violation of the legal limits, and that he mostly spent detained in squalid prison conditions.
The court decided to postpone the case until the hearing on 8 December to allow the defence to review the case files for the first time since the investigation was launched over five years ago, in 2020. According to the indictment filed by the SSSP, Metwally is being tried with 28 other defendants on terrorism-related charges allegedly committed between July 1992 and December 2024. This means that the crimes are alleged to have begun when some of the defendants, such as Anas Elbeltagy and Al Hassan Al Shater, were less than a year old.
The new case includes defendants who have already been sentenced or were already in pretrial detention on other charges, such as Dr. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (73 years old), the leader of the Misr Alkawyia (Strong Egypt) Party and former presidential candidate, and his deputy, Mohamed Al Qassas. Both were arrested in 2018 and are currently serving sentences of 15 and 10 years, respectively, which were issued by an Emergency Supreme State Security Court in 2022.
In December 2024, both Al Qassas and Aboul Fotouh were ‘recycled’ into Case No. 786, which first surfaced two years after their arrest. They were referred directly to trial on the same day the investigation concluded. The case also includes lawyer Ahmed Abou Baraka, whose trial in another case began last June, as well as Anas Elbeltagy, who has been detained without a single conviction for nearly 12 years.
Egypt: Third Simultaneous Trial Begins for Lawyer Ibrahim Metwally
