Ibrahim Matwally Hegazy is an attorney and father. On August 8, 2013, his eldest son, Abdelmoneim, disappeared during the bloody repression of the sit-ins at Rabea Al-Adawiya and Nahda squares in Cairo. It was literally a massacre, with more than 1,600 killed in the space of three days.

Afterward, Matwally took up a quest to find Abdelmonein, searching through the recesses of Egypt’s sordid prison system. Finally, in January 2016, he founded the Egyptian Association of Families of the Disappeared (EAFD), with the urgent mission of exposing the terror that befell Egypt in the wake of Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup. Their most important work: drawing up dossiers to submit to the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, so that constant pressure could be exerted on the Egyptian regime.

The task was enormous. In 2016, not a single day passed without at least one disappearance being reported to the group. By late December, they numbered 378 — mainly students and young people, but also others known for political, labor, or human rights activity. Among them was Matwally’s friend, Dr Ahmed Chawky Amasha, a veterinarian and cofounder of EAFD, who was kidnapped at a police barricade on March 10, 2017, then held incommunicado for a month at the Abbassia police headquarters in Cairo. There, he was brutally tortured before being indicted for “belonging to an illegal organization” and jailed in the Tora prison in Cairo.