About the Egypt Death Penalty Index

About the Index

Egypt’s death penalty crisis ranks among the most pressing human rights crises in the world. Under the rule of President Abdelfattah el-Sisi, the death penalty has been applied unlawfully and widely; thousands of people in Egypt, including children, have received preliminary death sentences under Egypt’s current regime, many in patently unfair mass trials.

In response to this crisis, Reprieve, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and a data research centre based in Cairo created the Egypt Death Penalty Index, a mapping project that aims to track every death sentence recommended by Egyptian courts between the 2011 revolution that unseated Egypt’s long-time military ruler Hosni Mubarak and 23 September 2018 (the day we stopped gathering data for this project). The Index is intended to act as a free, centralised open source database for anyone wishing to learn more about Egypt’s application of the death penalty as a whole, or about individual capital trials or defendants.

Going forward, Reprieve, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and a data research centre based in Cairo hope to update the Index periodically so that it remains as accurate and up to date possible. Our hope is that the Index will act as a running, real time approximation of capital punishment in Egypt, and will serve as a valuable resource to defendants and their families, human rights defenders, and international actors seeking to limit the scope of Egypt’s application of the death penalty.

About us

The Index was developed as a joint initiative by Reprieve, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and a data research centre based in Cairo.

Reprieve is a registered charity in England and Wales that carries out legal action work in various countries around the world. Reprieve uses strategic interventions to end the use of the death penalty globally, and secret prisons and state-sanctioned assassinations in the context of the so-called “war on terror”. Reprieve has extensive experience working on death penalty cases in Egypt and has focused particularly on juveniles facing death sentences.