Saudi Arabia deporting Egyptian activist facing life imprisonment

Sherryne Grace Badoui has spent months shuttling back and forth to a police station in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with her two-year-old and 10-month-old in tow.

She has been scrambling to glean scraps of information on her husband, an Egyptian who has been facing imminent deportation to Cairo since November.

Ahmed Kamel, who has spent months in a Saudi immigration detention centre, will be deported to Cairo on Wednesday, where he faces a life sentence for his role in pro-democracy protests in 2011 and 2014.

Rights groups warned that Kamel faces a high risk of torture should he be extradited.

Kamel fled to Saudi Arabia in 2015 after he was released from Egyptian prison and had completed a year of military service. He has since lived in Jeddah, remaining politically inactive, even on social media.

But on 12 November 2024, he was arrested by the Saudi authorities who informed him that he was facing extradition to Egypt following a Red Notice issued by Interpol in response to a request from Cairo.

Despite Interpol issuing a statement denying that it was responsible for the alert, the Saudi authorities and Egyptian consulate have continued to insist the organisation had prompted his arrest.

Kamel has since been held at Shumaisi immigration detention centre awaiting imminent deportation.

Now, on the day of his deportation, neither he nor Badoui have seen a shred of official documentation relating to his arrest.

Badaoui, who has been juggling parenting her two young children with navigating the labyrinthine and opaque Saudi judicial system, is exhausted.

While all this has been happening, her youngest is learning to walk.

“I have to talk and play and smile, and that’s the last thing I want to do. I feel really hopeless,” Badaoui told Middle East Eye.

“It’s just really surreal to see that people can just pluck somebody that you love out of your life this way, like for no reason at all.” 

A secret file

While the source of Kamel’s extradition order remains shrouded in secrecy, rights groups say the case bears the hallmarks of the Arab Interior Ministers Council (AIMC), a little-known body that has been connected to a surge in politically motivated extraditions of dissidents between Arab League countries.

In most of these cases, authorities initially cited Interpol as the source of the extradition orders. Many of the victims never see an arrest warrant.

Badaoui recalled a conversation with an official at the Egyptian consulate in which he insisted three times that Interpol issued Kamel’s extradition order.

“He bent down really close to my face, looked me directly in the eyes and kept repeating to me, ‘Your husband is going to be extradited,’” she said.

Some time later, Badaoui was barred from the police station. Her lawyer brought them the letter from Interpol stating that they did not issue the extradition order, but the police refused to accept it.

Kamel’s lawyer went repeatedly to the police station requesting information on his charges but was told there was no file on him. Finally, on 15 January, the police admitted there was a file, but that it was secret and she could not view the contents.

Kamel had been arrested once before in 2022, when he visited the Egyptian consulate for a background check for an American spousal visa. 

He was told the arrest was on the basis of an Interpol Red Notice that was prompted by a kidnapping charge, which is not listed in his Summary of Court file in Egypt. He was released three days later.

But this time, he remains in the dark as to his charges.

“In 2022, the justice system worked,” Badaoui told MEE. “They detained him on request of Egypt… Ahmed denied the charges. They let him go. Now, in 2024, two babies later they are destroying our lives for nothing”.

Specifically targeted

On 18 November, an Egyptian court issued a stay of execution order that stated Kamel is no longer wanted pending trial.

According to Egyptian law, once a sentence is appealed in absentia, detention is suspended until the case is reviewed and there is a final sentence.

“So legally he’s free until his review session. He is being specifically targeted,” Yasmin Omar, international human rights lawyer and the director of the Democracy Matters initiative at the Middle East Democracy Centre, told MEE.

But when Kamel’s brother tried to submit the stay of execution to the Egyptian consulate in Jeddah, they refused to accept it and instructed him to take it to Interpol in Cairo.

Kamel’s Egyptian lawyer then took the document to Interpol in Cairo, who requested a second document, entitled Summary of the Court file, from the Egyptian court.

When the lawyer submitted the document, Interpol Cairo informed him that they would get back to him in two days, but he never heard from them.

Kamel’s lawyer and Badaoui then submitted a request for his release to the Public Prosecutor on 15 December, however the prosecutor closed the case, demanding the Egyptian court issue retrial dates.

On 24 February, Kamel’s retrial date was finally set, but because the Saudi authorities had refused to provide any documentation confirming his detention to show the courts, they were unable to reschedule the date.

“There is a big worry that if we can’t reschedule, the judge could reinstate a 25-year sentence on Ahmed just for the fact that he is missing the session even though it isn’t our fault because they’ll assume he is fleeing,” Badaoui said.