Two years ago, Egyptian authorities sent kids to capture stray dogs living around Saint Catherine’s Protectorate and told them they would be put into a fenced gate next to the checkpoint. “Instead, they made a hole and buried the dogs,” one Sinai resident told me. “Half of them alive.”

As world leaders gathered in the Sinai Peninsula for Cop27, Egyptian authorities once again offered 500 Egyptian pounds for dogs from Saint Catherine’s Monastery to be removed. It was part of a mass cleanup as the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi presses ahead with the Grand Transfiguration Project, a mega-tourism hub it is building in this peaceful retreat which will encompass five-star hotels, a restaurant, shopping bazaars, a visitor’s centre and more.

A scorching day inside Egypt’s Tanta Prison and Emad Kamil is straining to hear news from his relatives. They have been placed on one side of the hall with 50 other visitors. Emad is on the other side, over one metre away, with 15 other prisoners.

Two sets of wire mesh separate them, police officers patrol the space in between and Emad suspects there are informants present. A jumble of voices travel across the space. It’s impossible to get accurate information about the charges against him.

Shortly before the 11 year anniversary of the Day of Rage Egyptian activist living in the US, Aly Hussin Mahdy, sent me two videos which had been recorded inside Katameya Prison in Egypt. The videos are believed to have been filmed in 2021 and show inmates being tortured. In the footage, an inmate is blindfolded and lies face down on the floor with his hands tied to his legs behind his back, whilst others have wounds on their legs and backs.

I co-hosted a podcast ‘Untold Stories’ with Egyptian journalist Osama Gaweesh about the tragic deaths of 27 people who drowned at the end of November trying to cross the English Channel, the sea which separates England from France. We were joined by Sally Hough, who runs a weekly drop-in for refugees, and Green Party Councillor Georgina Treloar.

When Amr’s mother went to visit his brother in an Egyptian jail, the police guards told her: “Turkey will deport your son very soon, and he will pay the price for his negative coverage of Egypt.” As a political exile living in Turkey, Amr Hashad was terrified by this threat on his security. He knows very well the inside of Egypt’s prison system, and what authorities do to outspoken opponents of the government. Arrested in Egypt in 2014, Amr was detained for five years and moved between 11 different prisons, where he was tortured regularly.

Aly Hussin Mahdy ignored his father’s text messages for quite some time. As a politically outspoken Egyptian asylum seeker living in Chicago, he was concerned about leaving an electronic trail that the feared intelligence services back home could read.

On 11 February 2011 President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for 30 years, stepped down from power. It was a moment of intense euphoria and immense upheaval in the region. Here, eight Egyptians tell their story of the 18 days of protest and 10 years of tyranny that followed his downfall through exclusive interviews and video footage.

In 2011 residents of the fishing town of Idku close to Egypt’s northern city of Alexandria gathered to oppose British Petroleum’s (BP) plans to pump gas onshore where they would process it for onwards shipment. There were many parts of the project which angered activists including the proposition that the gas plant would be built on Idku’s sandy strip of beach.

Over 5,000 Eritreans leave their country each month due to severe human rights violations committed by the government. Isaias Afwerki's one-party state exerts control over the media and the judiciary and uses torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances to repress its own people. One in every 11 Eritreans are refugees.

At 3am, two weeks after he spoke out in a meeting against members of the ruling Popular Front for Democracy Party, security forces entered Mohamed’s house, beat him up in front of his mother and his wife and accused him of trafficking people out of Eritrea.

At 1.38am on Wednesday 14 June Rania Ibrahim streamed a live video on her Facebook wall from inside her home, a flat on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower where she lived with her husband and two young children. The building is on fire, she says, holding the phone out of the window to show viewers that the blaze had reached the 20th floor and is making its way in her direction.

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi – Egypt’s then head of military intelligence – directed that forced virginity tests be carried out on women in Tahrir Square to “protect” them against allegations of rape. Seventeen women were detained, strip-searched, given electric shocks, forced to have the examination and then declared not to be virgins.

When the Merowe Dam in Sudan was built Ali Askouri, his

family and their community were flooded out of their homes 80

kilometres from where it was being constructed to make way

for the project; part of his family were pressured to move to

resettlement housing and part of them stayed in the area. That

was in 2008. To this day, the government have not compensated

these families.