Egypt threatens to shut down centre documenting torture amid widening clampdown

For more than two decades, a team of psychiatrists in downtown Cairo have provided a unique service in Egypt: therapy for people who say they are victims of torture.

Now authorities are trying to shut down the Nadeem Centre, housed in an apartment building off a street full of auto parts dealers and mechanics. Twice in the past three months, most recently on Wednesday, police have stormed in with closure orders. So far, the centre has managed to ward them off while its lawyers protest.

Its founders, however, fear the government is determined to eliminate an organisation that, beyond helping victims, produces detailed documentation of police torture. Those accounts contrast starkly with officials’ repeated denials that such abuses take place, except in rare, individual cases.

Last year, the centre tallied around 600 cases of police torture and almost 500 people killed by security forces, 100 of them while incarcerated.

“I haven’t seen a worse situation than what we have now — the violations, the impunity, the defiance” by police, said Aida Seif el-Dawla, a psychiatrist and one of the centre’s co-founders.

“They keep repeating that there is no torture, that there are no forced disappearances, as if this would somehow make it a valid statement,” she said.