Egypt: Ahmed Seif Al Islam - in Memoriam

press release

Egypt has just lost one of its human rights pioneers, and Human Rights Watch has lost a dear friend, with the passing of Ahmed Seif Al Islam on August 27, 2014, following his hospitalization for heart ailments. Seif - as his friends in the movement usually addressed him - was a founder and long-time director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC), named after another early human rights activist who died at a tragically young age.

Seif, a human rights lawyer, was on the legal defense team in numerous high-profile trials of human rights, labor, and more broadly political activists in the Hosni Mubarak years, but he was above all an activist himself. The HMLC was more often than not the coordinating center for planning peaceful demonstrations and then, invariably, for deploying lawyers to various detention centers in response to the usual mass arrests that followed such events. Their office on a six-floor walk-up in Bab al-Luq (the elevator more often than not was inoperable) was close to the main courthouse, the General Prosecutor's office, and the Lawyers Syndicate, and was Cairo's networking site par excellence, even with the advent of social media. This was the case for instance when security forces raided the HMLC offices on the morning of February 3, 2011, and arrested Seif along with 30 other lawyers, activists, and human rights defenders gathered there, including then-Human Rights Watch researcher Dan Williams.

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