CAIRO — A Cairo court has ruled against forced virginity tests on female protesters detained in military prisons.
“The court orders that the execution of the procedure of virginity tests on girls inside military prisons be stopped,” Judge Ali Fekri, head of the Cairo Administrative Court, announced Tuesday.
The ruling came in the case of Samira Ibrahim, a woman who sued the Egyptian army for being subjected to a forcible virginity test in a military prison.
Ibrahim was detained, along with about 20 other female protesters, after a March 9 sit-in at Tahrir Square.
An army general speaking to CNN on condition of anonymity two months later did not deny that virginity tests were conducted on female demonstrators. “We didn’t want them to say that we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general told CNN.
Los Angeles Times
