'No end in sight': detention wears on for American who ran Egypt children's clinic

For two years after she was arrested, Aya Hijazi refused to give up hope that Egypt’s courts would let her, an American who ran a child welfare clinic, go free to reunite with her family. Nine hundred days after her arrest, she has started to lose that hope.

“In the first year and a half, she had taken it with a lot of grace,” said her sister, Alaa. “After she hit the two-year mark, five-month mark, she’s been despondent. She’s feeling no certainty or end in sight.”

The whole family has felt the toll. Their mother recently became bedridden, Alaa said, adding: “I wake with nightmares sometimes, in a panic. You never think that something like this could happen.”

The Hijazi siblings grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. After graduating George Mason University in 2009, Aya Hijazi left for Cairo, where she met her future husband, Mohamed Hassanein, in Tahrir Square during the country’s 2011 revolution.

Disenchanted by Egypt’s convulsing politics, the couple used their wedding fund to start a not-for-profit group, Belady, meant to offer a refuge for homeless children.

By May 2014, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi had taken control of the country and cracked down on dissent, real and perceived. His security forces took notice of the Belady center. According to a human rights group supporting them, Hijazi, Hassanein, six volunteers and several children were arrested in a raid.

The police didn’t let them speak with a lawyer for a day, said Wade McMullen, a lawyer for Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, a not-for-profit organization that has taken on Hijazi’s case. During questioning, Hassanein was beaten and Hijazi was threatened and struck on the head, McMullen said. They were eventually charged with human trafficking and sexual abuse.

“For about three days they were incommnicado,” Alaa Hijazi said. “All my mother knew was the headlines about this American woman, which were all the same template.”

Right before the 2014 election that Sisi hoped would cement his rule, state-censored media ran with the sensationalist story – an American woman involved in kidnapping and sexual abuse. Officials reported that Sisi won 96.1% of the vote.

“It’s very clear that they wanted big, splash propaganda to show that the government was standing up to the big, bad west,” McMullen said.

Alaa Hijazi said: “It’s the idea in this public narrative of Americans corrupting our children and it caters to the idea of western influence and loose morals.”

The family and human rights groups say the charges are bogus, and that a forensic examination of the children showed that they had suffered abuse before they were taken in by Belady. Prosecutors stalled, renewing detention without charges for 15 days at a time, a tactic McMullen said has become “quite routine”.

Egypt has a limit of two-year pre-trial detention, but McMullen said the courts had adjourned for as long as six months, delaying any trial. Hijazi said that at first, the family did not want to go to the press or US officials.

“We waited a while trying to be not too antagonizing – not that it’s a crime to be an American, but we didn’t want to reinforce the impression. We hoped this would self-correct,” Hijazi said.

“But Aya has a law degree. A few times she would try to say something just on her own behalf and the courts wouldn’t even permit that.”

Time and Egypt’s labyrinthine justice system weakened the family’s hopes: “We don’t have any faith in the judiciary,” Hijazi said. They eventually approached US officials, petitioned the United Nations working group on arbitrary detention and, finally, spoke to the press.

Neither the White House nor the state department nor the Egyptian embassy in Washington responded to questions about the case, but Barack Obama’s administration has called for Hijazi’s release, if in muted terms.

In September, the Hijazis met Washington’s UN ambassador, Samantha Power, and Avril Haines, one of Obama’s national security advisers, who “reiterated the president’s deep concern for the welfare of all American citizens held abroad”, according to a White House statement.

“The United States will continue to offer her all possible consular support,” the White House added. “The United States calls on the [Egyptian] government to drop all charges against Hijazi and release her from prison.”

A handful of senators and representatives, led by the Virginia representative Don Beyer, have urged Obama and Sisi to secure the Belady group’s release as a means to improve ties between the US and Egypt.

“The charges against them are as salacious as they are farcical,” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said late last month. “She and the others should be immediately released. Absent proof, made available for all to see, that they have committed a punishable offense, the charges should be dismissed.”

Human rights groups have condemned the detention and said it falls within a larger campaign against aid and civil rights workers.

“From everything we can tell, it’s ridiculous,” said Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “She’s been held in conditions that are worrisome, denied medicines that she needs, and there’s no reason for her to be there. The charges against her should be dropped and she should be sent home.

“She got swept up into this excessively heavy handed approach by the Sisi government to go after a whole range of actors. So while the work she was doing was for children, development oriented, it seems very likely that she was lumped in with a campaign against NGOs, human rights organizations and in some cases even against difficulties with western governments.”

A “very virulent anti-American and anti-western” sentiment has dominated Egyptian media for months, Margon said, noting how difficult it had been for the US to secure the release of another American, Mohamed Soltan, who was released only after a 16-month hunger strike and international attention to the case.

According to Amnesty International, more than 40,000 people have been imprisoned in Egypt since 2013, many tortured or detained without trial or legal counsel.

“In a way, we’re lucky that she’s not been tortured,” McMullen said. “We’re quite aware of the relative privilege but it’s sad that we have to be grateful.”