charges of spreading “false rumours” and attempting to overthrow the government. He had helped to file a lawsuit challenging the government’s decision to cede the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia. A court ordered his release on 28 August. Security forces arrested the chair of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, Ahmed Abdallah, on 25 April and the group’s minorities’ director, Mina Thabet, on 19 May. The organization had documented enforced disappearances in Egypt. Both men were remanded in custody but were not formally charged and were released on bail on 18 June and 10 September respectively. ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES The NSA abducted hundreds of people without judicial order and held them incommunicado for prolonged periods, outside of judicial oversight and without access to family members or legal representation.1 The authorities continued to deny that such enforced disappearances occurred. The security forces targeted suspected supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and activists with other political affiliations. Some enforced disappearances were carried out by Military Intelligence officials. The NSA detained 14-year-old Aser Mohamed on 12 January and subjected him to enforced disappearance for 34 days. He said NSA interrogators forced him to “confess” under torture to “terrorism”-related charges, and that a prosecutor threatened him with further torture if he retracted his confession. His trial was ongoing at the end of the year. TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT Security officials subjected detainees to beatings and ill-treatment upon arrest. NSA interrogators tortured and otherwise ill-treated many victims of enforced disappearance to extract “confessions” for use against them at trial. Methods included severe beatings, electric shocks and being forced to adopt stress positions. Egyptian human rights 148 groups documented dozens of reports of deaths in custody due to torture and other illtreatment and inadequate access to medical care. On 20 September, a court sentenced nine police officers to three-year prison sentences for assaulting doctors at a hospital in the Cairo district of Matariya in January. The court released the officers on bail pending an appeal. UNFAIR TRIALS Criminal courts continued to conduct mass unfair trials involving dozens – sometimes hundreds – of defendants on charges of participating in protests and political violence following the ousting of Mohamed Morsi as president in July 2013. In some trials involving defendants who had been subjected to enforced disappearance, courts accepted “confessions” obtained through torture as evidence. In addition to dedicated “circuits” (special courts) for terrorism-related trials, military courts unfairly tried hundreds of civilians, including in mass trials. In August the authorities extended a law vastly expanding the jurisdiction of military courts to include crimes committed against “public installations” for a further five years. Courts tried more than 200 people on charges of taking part in protests against the government’s decision to cede the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, sentencing many to prison terms of between two to five years and heavy fines. Appeals courts subsequently overturned most prison sentences. More than 490 people, including Irish national Ibrahim Halawa, faced charges of participating in violence during a protest in August 2013, in a mass trial which opened in 2014. The charges against Ibrahim Halawa were considered by Amnesty International to be trumped up. On 18 June, a court sentenced ousted president Mohamed Morsi to 25 years in prison for leading a “banned group” and a further 15 years for stealing classified Amnesty International Report 2016/17