Since Al-Sisi effectively rose to power in July 2013 after ousting Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsy, Egyptian authorities have arrested and charged tens of thousands of political opponents. A law introduced shortly after Morsy’s ouster effectively banned all peaceful protests, and authorities have used it as a justification to arrest and prosecute thousands of protesters. Widespread arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances have been a hallmark of Al-Sisi’s rule.

The systematic and widespread killing of largely peaceful protesters in Rab’a Square in August 2013 that Al-Sisi personally supervised as defense minister, is the biggest mass killing of protesters in Egypt’s history and one of the largest in the world in recent decades. The killings probably amount to crimes against humanity. In one day, security forces killed at least 817 people when they violently dispersed tens of thousands of pro-Morsy demonstrators who gathered to protest his forced removal by the army.

In Jan 2016, the Egyptian security forces burned, beaten and mutilated the 28-year old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni. After almost 5 years, and solid evidences that the Italian government has on five accused Egyptian officers, Al-Sisi government refuses to cooperate. After his murder, Regeni's mother said: "...they tortued him as if he were an Egyptian!".

In May 2015, the government-sponsored National Council for Human Rights said in a report that prisons were 160 percent over capacity and police stations 300 percent over in the months following Morsy’s ouster. The overcrowding and poor detention conditions led to a “rash” of deaths in custody that Human Rights Watch documented.

The truth is far more bitter and uglier than that, more than 100,000 political prisoners are living sub-humane life in Al-Sisi's prisons. Torture with the most brutal means has become the norm in one of the deadliest prisons in Egypt called " the scorpion". The prisoners are left to die and suffer from chronic illnesses where medication and medical treatment are prevented. 

According to the Committee for Justice, a Geneva-based independent human rights group, the number of detainees who died in Egyptian custody between June 2013 and December 2019 could be as high as 958. Almost none of these deaths has been meaningfully investigated. 

We are the undersigned lawful Egyptian American citezens, and our American borthers and sisters who stand with human rights and against injustice,  are requesting that our representitive congressmen and congresswomen put the highest possible pressure on Al-Sisi and his government to free all political prisoners in Egyptian prisons.