Five years after their arrest, ten Egyptian Nubian citizens remain arbitrarily detained in Saudi Arabia. Their case, stemming from the peaceful commemoration of Egypt’s October War victory, underscores the Saudi authorities’ ongoing criminalization of cultural expression, civic association, and dissent. Despite recent headlines about prisoner releases, the continued incarceration of these men tells a very different story about the direction of human rights in the Kingdom.
The arrests began on 14 July 2020, when Saudi state security forces raided the home of Adel Sayed Ibrahim Fakir, head of the Nubian community in Riyadh. Over the following days, nine other members of Nubian civic associations were detained, including Farajallah Ahmed Yousef, Jamal Abdullah Masri, Mohamed Fathallah Gomaa, Sayyed Hashem Shater, Ali Gomaa Ali Bahr, Saleh Gomaa Ahmed, Abdulsalam Gomaa Ali Bahr, Abdullah Gomaa Ali, and Wael Ahmed Hassan Ishaq. As reported by ALQST, their arrest was prompted by their attempt to organize a peaceful community event in October 2019 to commemorate the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Following their detention, the ten men were held incommunicado for two months and denied access to legal counsel throughout prolonged pre-trial detention. In October 2022, after proceedings that fell far short of fair trial standards, Saudi Arabia’s Specialised Criminal Court sentenced them to between 10 and 18 years in prison. Their charges, according to the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), included spreading false information on social media, establishing an unlicensed association, and supporting a banned group. These sentences were upheld by the Court of Appeal in February 2023.
Many of the detainees are elderly and in poor health. Both Adel Fakir and Dr. Farajallah Ahmed Yousef, the current and former leaders of the Nubian community in Riyadh, suffer from chronic conditions requiring regular treatment. Others have missed years of family life, and one detainee’s mother passed away during his imprisonment. Despite repeated calls for a humanitarian solution, the men remain in Abha Prison with only sporadic family contact.
According to the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, the trial was riddled with violations. Detainees were denied access to independent legal representation, pressured into confessions under coercion, and subjected to prosecution demands to rewrite defense memoranda to omit references to torture. These abuses reflect a broader pattern of due process violations in Saudi Arabia’s handling of civic activists and prisoners of conscience.
The silence of Egyptian authorities has further compounded the injustice. Families of the detainees have appealed to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Council for Human Rights, and the Egyptian embassy in Riyadh, but their pleas have gone unanswered. This failure to intervene raises serious concerns about Egypt’s commitment to safeguarding the rights of its citizens abroad, especially when they belong to marginalized ethnic or civic communities.
Their continued imprisonment for a peaceful act of cultural remembrance reveals the hollowness of Saudi Arabia’s reform narrative. As ALQST points out, the wave of recent prisoner releases cannot be interpreted as a genuine shift in policy. Many detainees remain behind bars, others face renewed repression upon release, and the overall human rights situation—particularly for foreign nationals—continues to deteriorate.
Five years on, the case of these ten Nubian Egyptians stands as a stark reminder that in Saudi Arabia, peaceful expression can still be punished with decades in prison. Their story deserves renewed international attention—and urgent calls for justice.