Force and Fiat| How Egypt wields deportation orders against refugees

“What’s our crime?,” a young man asks me, after being deported from Egypt to Sudan following a harrowing stretch in Egyptian detention. The same question comes from the mother reporting her son’s detention, a son not even 15 years-old, and from a father searching for his son who never came home from class, only to learn later that he’d been deported to Sudan. And from the thousands of others whose deportations rights groups, journalists, and lawyers have documented, all following the same recurring path.

Arrest in the street, on public transport, at home or work, or on the roads leading to refugee service providers. Then a check of passport and residency papers, which is often accompanied by mishandling or confiscation, and in some cases the tearing up of UNHCR registration cards and registration appointment slips, or whatever proof exists that a residency renewal is pending. Then a report is filed for illegal entry or residency, and some detainees are referred to the Public Prosecution.

But release and referral to the “competent administrative authority” does not mean, in the cases I’ve handled since the start of the year, that the person regains their freedom. What follows instead is a period of administrative detention and transfer between police stations and detention facilities, ending at the General Administration for Passports, Immigration, and Nationality. There, the detainee shifts from being a suspect in a police report to the subject of a deportation order, then to a deportee moved toward the border without ever actually reaching a lawyer, a judge, or asylum procedures.

This pathway strips deportation of its character as an individual, exceptional decision the moment it is repeated on a wide, systematic scale; built on near-identical report templates and resting on general indicators that have nothing to do with the individual concerned. Sometimes, as I explained in the first part of this series, it is the authorities themselves who manufacture the crisis: forcing migrants into irregular routes by stripping them of safe entry channels and real access to registration and asylum procedures. Then arresting them on charges of violation and deporting them from the country.

Bound by judicial limits, in theory

Administrative deportation is not legitimated merely by the existence of an administrative violation. It must rest on facts and grounds specific to the individual, taking into account their legal status and the risk of return in their particular case. When the process instead ends with returning a refugee or asylum seeker to a dangerous country without this individualized review, deportation becomes, in its legal and practical effect, forced return.

Deportation rests on Law No. 89 of 1960 on the Entry, Residence, and Exit of Foreigners. Article 25 authorizes the Minister of Interior to issue deportation orders, but it does not create an unchecked power; Article 26 restricts the deportation of special-residency holders to specific grounds, requiring referral to and approval by the Deportation Committee; Article 27 permits temporary detention of a person pending deportation until proceedings conclude.

None of these provisions, however, sanction detention without a defined period, denial of access to a lawyer, denial of contact with UNHCR, denial of access to asylum procedures, or refusal to hear grounds against return.

The Administrative Court had already mapped the boundaries of this power before the asylum law existed. In Appeals No. 24 of Judicial Year 8 and No. 452 of Judicial Year 9, session of March 28, 1964, the Supreme Administrative Court held that deportation is a right of the state, but one bound by the proper use of power and the existence of serious grounds required by the public interest, within the limits of the law. The administrative judge reviews jurisdiction, procedure, and the validity of cause and purpose, and voids any order tainted by a violation of law or an abuse of power.

In a further ruling, Appeal No. 428 of Judicial Year 48, session of April 21, 2007, the Court stressed that the grounds for deportation must be drawn plausibly from the case file, and that the use of power for anything other than a valid reason constitutes arbitrariness and an abuse of power. The Administrative Court applied this same standard in Case No. 46625 of Judicial Year 64, session of Jan. 24 2012.

On these principles, “ministry instructions” or other vague, general invocations of the public interest, or standardized report templates, grant the Interior Ministry neither the right nor the justification to issue an order that ends in a human being’s expulsion from the country. They in fact bar the Ministry from bypassing individual review and from relying on security sweeps to arrest refugees and migrants, turning a residency violation into a final presumption of deportability.

In short: deportation is an individual, exceptional decision, not collective punishment, and not a tool for managing asylum from outside the protection system.

Breaching commitments

This pathway also erases the legal distinction between an ordinary foreigner and a refugee or asylum seeker. Residency rules may apply to the latter in certain respects, but this does not erase their protected status, nor does it lift the duty to verify the risk of return before carrying out any deportation, under the Egyptian Constitution itself, which guarantees personal freedom in Article 54, and which states in Article 91 the state’s right to grant asylum to foreigners deprived of public rights and freedoms, and prohibits the extradition of political refugees.

Article 151 further grants treaties that Egypt ratifies and publishes, once duly enacted, the force of law. As a state party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, Egypt is bound by Article 33, which prohibits expelling or returning a refugee to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened, and by Article 31, which protects, under specified conditions, against penalization for illegal entry or presence.

None of this grants blanket immunity from any action. But it does bar the Interior Ministry from using an entry or residency violation as a substitute for reviewing a protection claim, or as a shortcut for returning someone to danger.

Forced return

This was the understanding the Administrative Court affirmed even before the asylum law was passed. In Case No. 36123 of Judicial Year 67, session of 25 July 2020, the Administrative Court tied a deportation order to Egypt’s obligations under the 1951 Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and to the duty to allow the person concerned to present grounds against deportation and to have the decision reviewed before a competent body.

In Case No. 25621 of Judicial Year 78, session of Jan. 18, 2025, the Court struck down a deportation order against a Sudanese refugee registered with UNHCR. In doing so, the Court drew a distinction between the status of an ordinary foreigner and the protected status of a refugee, and affirmed that deporting a registered Sudanese refugee or asylum seeker, amid the humanitarian catastrophe and abuses underway in that country, breaches Egypt’s international commitments and threatens its historic standing.

These precedents offer, in the clearest terms, a homegrown reading of Egypt’s international obligations: no deportation without a risk assessment, no real protection without an effective right to challenge and appeal. This is, unfortunately, not what appears in the Asylum of Foreigners Law No. 164 of 2024 or its executive regulations, which offer no explicit, sufficient incorporation of these rules, particularly regarding the protection of asylum seekers before status is granted and during grievance and appeal.

What good is an appeal?

It’s true that Article 13 of the asylum law prohibits extraditing or forcibly returning a refugee to their country of nationality or habitual residence. However, it ties this explicit protection to those who have already been granted refugee status. An asylum seeker still in registration, review, grievance, or appeal, precisely the person most exposed to arrest and deportation, has no clear, sufficient textual guarantee.

Nor does the law clearly address the risk of indirect return to a third country, and neither the law nor its regulations explicitly provide for automatic suspension of deportation throughout grievance, appeal, legal representation, and free legal aid.

What good, then, is an appeal that doesn’t halt deportation or suspend proceedings until it’s heard? What is left for the courts to protect once a person has already been transferred to a country at war, or to persecution?

The executive regulations, issued under Prime Ministerial Decree No. 1568 of 2026, do regulate referral to the Interior Ministry for deportation action in cases of rejected or withdrawn applications, loss of status, or expiry of asylum. But they fail to provide adequate protection for those whose protection claims have not yet been decided, or for those arrested before ever reaching the Deportation Committee or asylum procedures. Nor do they make legal aid a genuine right available at every stage, or sufficiently guarantee a lawyer’s presence or access to case files before a decision affecting liberty and life.

Nor should coordination difficulties between UNHCR or the Deportation Committee and administrative bodies become a burden borne by the person seeking protection, or a pretext for their deportation. If registration or residency procedures are difficult or delayed, that should lead to greater caution, not to accelerated deportation.

Where a UNHCR document or registration appointment exists, it should be examined, not ignored. And when a person declares fear of return, the deportation process must be halted until that claim is seriously examined even if the person is not yet registered. The Interior Ministry must bear direct responsibility for managing residency, arrest, detention, and deportation, and for verifying available documents and notifications before taking any action.

The protection gap deepens further with refugees and asylum seekers being denied the ability to retain lawyers, as a statement by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights made clear. Such a denial can block a person from securing their basic legal rights and taking legal action.

Incitement paves the way for exclusion

The security campaign against refugees is not unfolding in a political or social vacuum. It coincides with waves of digital and media hate speech and incitement against refugees and asylum seekers, Sudanese and Syrians especially, and against those who support them.

These narratives peddle misleading claims linking refugees to crime, economic crisis, or strain on services, driving people to report or expel them based on nationality, skin color, or false information about their legal status.

Whether this coincidence proves an operational link between any given account or campaign and state institutions or not, it exposes a dangerous political climate in which protection is framed as a burden and exclusion is offered as a solution.

Hate speech is not merely a harsh opinion. It manufactures social acceptance for arrest, detention, and deportation, and makes victims more afraid to seek help or report abuses.

Here the interior ministry’s responsibility doubles: not to treat incitement or reports based on nationality and ethnicity as legitimate grounds for suspicion; to prevent their exploitation in operations that target specific communities; and to prove, through action rather than statement, that the right to protection does not collapse in the face of a digital campaign or populist anger. The true test of any legal system lies not in the list of statutes it proclaims, but in its practical capacity to restrain executive overreach and protect the most vulnerable at moments of danger.

That moment is a refugee standing before the officer detaining them, or before a deportation order, or at a border crossing where it will be decided whether this human being is given a chance at protection, or forced back into war, prison, or torture.

Either the legal system becomes a real shield for this person, or it remains a formal backdrop to collective security decisions. This choice can no longer be made without legal, political, and human cost, not only to refugees themselves, but to Egypt’s legal reputation and its standing in the international order. Its image risks inverting: from a country that prides itself on its historic role in drafting the international and regional conventions protecting refugees, to one where deaths of refugees in detention are documented while they sought protection.