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The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms launches an analytical paper titled “Patterns of Judicial Referral and Their Impact on Fair Trial Guarantees (2024–2025),” with the aim of providing a descriptive statistical analysis of cases referred to trial during 2024 and 2025, amid an unprecedented escalation in the rate of referrals of Supreme State Security cases during this period.
This paper comes as part of the outputs of the “Between the Cage and Exile” campaign launched by the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms to shed light on decisions to refer political prisoners to trial after long years of investigation before the prosecution and pretrial detention.
The paper includes an analysis of 330 cases involving no fewer than 9,263 defendants, most of which date back to the period between 2014 and 2025, with the majority still in pretrial detention. The year 2025 recorded the highest figures compared to the previous year, with referrals reaching 67.3%, amounting to 222 cases, compared to 108 cases in 2024, while 304 cases remain pending before courts of first instance.
The paper is based on a documented database and relies on a triangulation methodology and data verification through multiple independent sources, including case files and official judicial documents in 124 cases, data from lawyers and human rights organizations, and media coverage related to court proceedings.
This paper is released in conjunction with the adoption of the new Criminal Procedure Law, which raises serious concerns regarding the subjection of thousands of defendants to remote trials, and the potential challenges this may pose to the right to defense and effective communication with lawyers.
The paper considers the issue of referral to be of particular importance, not only as a transition from the investigation stage to the trial stage, but also in terms of its practical impact on the right to personal liberty and the right to have cases decided within a reasonable time. It emphasizes the need to take referral into account so that it does not turn into a temporal extension of detention, especially in the absence of effective procedural safeguards, thereby shifting the burden of restrictions on liberty from the pretrial detention phase to the trial phase without a substantive remedy to the causes of prolonged proceedings.