Egyptian Rights Chief’s Comparison of Prison to ‘Five-Star Hotel’ Draws Backlash

CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – The head of Egypt’s state-backed National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) has sparked criticism online after comparing a prison complex to luxury accommodation.

In an interview on the Egyptian channel Sada Elbalad, Moushira Mahmoud Khattab spoke about changes made to benefit “guests” in prisons and compared the large Wadi al-Natrun prison complex to a “five-star hotel”.
The interviewer added that the prison complexes included a hospital and food as “changes made in the guests’ favor”.
Social media users responded with sarcastic remarks while noting the speaker’s euphemistic use of “guests” to refer to detainees.
One user asked: “What are the entry requirements?”
Another said that like most hotels, it has “15 people in the room”.
Meanwhile, one person tweeted that Khattab should “stay there with her kids and husband, spend one or two weeks, stick to what guests (prisoners) should do, and then we will believe you”.
One user said that the statements were “very strange”, adding that it was the first time they had seen an advertisement for prisons, and another said Khattab was trying to “flatter herself with power and social status”.
Meanwhile, human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany called Khattab’s comments “not only wildly inaccurate, but also a disturbing erasure of the lived experiences of detainees”.
Middle East Eye reached out to the NCHR for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The Wadi al-Natrun prison is one of two complexes that were launched as part of Egypt’s National Human Rights Strategy (NHRS) in 2021, which included plans to modernize prisons.
It has come under heavy criticism from rights groups who say that the facilities fall short of international standards.
Human Rights Watch called a 2021 government-made video about the prison a “caricature of an idyllic rehabilitative life” that covers up “a deeply sinister reality of Egypt’s abusive prison system” and a “crude attempt” to erase the “lived trauma of thousands of prisoners and their families”.