Hisham Kassem Suspends His Hunger Strike 23 Days after the Total Strike Out of Respect for the Court

September 13, 2023. Cairo

Press Release

 

Hisham Kassem Suspends His Hunger Strike

  23 Days after the Total Strike

Out of Respect for the Court

Writer and publisher Hisham Kassem decided to suspend his total hunger strike, which began on August 23, 2023 out of respect for the court and so as to avoid any suspicion of influence on it. The court is scheduled to issue its ruling against Mr. Kassem on Saturday, September 16, 2023.

Mr. Kassem confirmed that the reason for his hunger strike was to protest the fabrication of his accusation and the arbitrary measures taken against him, which led to him being imprisoned pending court referral.

This comes after his lawyer submitted a report to the Public Prosecution yesterday, Tuesday, September 12, asking it to visit Mr. HishamKassem’s prison in order to take legal measures investigating the strike incident and try to dissuade him from it.

Mr. Hisham’s wife as well as his lawyer visited him in his prison yesterday, September 12, 2023 and both managed to convince Mr. Hisham suspend the hunger strike, out of respect for the court. As a result, he decided to suspend his strike and record it in a report of procedures inside the 10th of Ramadan Prison, affiliated with the Egyptian Prisons Service.

The political activist and writer Hisham Kassem, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Free Current, and former head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, faces a prison sentence and a fine in the accusations attributed to him in a fabricated case by police officers, in which he verbally assaulted them, while he was in the SayyidaZeinab Police station of the Ministry of the Interior to fulfill some procedures related to a former minister’s complaint against him.