Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I support and welcome this all-party motion as an escalation, at least, of the political intervention of this House in securing the release of Ibrahim Halawa, a prisoner of conscience. I pay tribute to his family for their resoluteness in continuing to fight for the release of their brother. However, I have to be honest and say that I do not believe we are going to secure his release until we realise what we are dealing with. It is simply inaccurate for people to recycle the claims of the Egyptian Government that there is a thing called the separation of powers in Egypt. There absolutely is not. All semblance of any kind of legal due process, anything one could even remotely call a legal process, has been abandoned by the el-Sisi regime. The police and the judiciary are now nothing more than tools of the counter-revolution that is taking place in Egypt, which is vicious and cruel in its character.

I spoke to one of the Egyptian Arab Spring activists at the weekend who told me just how bad it is. Some 3,000 people have been killed by the security forces over the past year or two in the counter-revolution. There are now 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. The Egyptian regime is currently building 16 new prisons to hold political prisoners. Nobody is allowed go to football matches in Egypt anymore. Football matches are played in front of empty stadiums now. Such is the level of repression that they will not even allow people to watch football matches. It is vicious. Disappearances are happening daily. In Alexandria in the past month or so, 20 people disappeared and shortly afterwards the police went into the hospital and demanded that the doctors write out falsified medical certificates about those people. This is extraordinary stuff.

We have to stop treating the Egyptian regime with kid gloves, pretending it is normal when in fact it is engaged in ruthless suppression of its own population and one of our citizens has been caught up in this. We have to call them for what they are and we have to talk about sanctions. We need to demand them at European level and be willing to impose them ourselves.

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