"Let people know I'm here because I'm a human rights defender and not for any other fabricated reason"
- Patrick Zaki (December 28th, 2020)
About the project
On February 7th 2020, Patrick Zaki was coming back home in Egypt for visiting his family. At the arrival in Cairo, he was arrested on charges of “harming national security”.
He arrived from Bologna, where he was pursuing a European Master’s degree on Gender and Women Studies. As a defender of equality, freedom and human rights he was a researcher in a human rights organization based in Cairo, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
Dissemination of fake news and incitement to protest are the baseless accusations causing Zaki’s ongoing detention in Tora maximum security prison, as a political dissident. It was ordered by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Government and put in place by Egyptian National Security Agency. During the days of the arrest, he was forced to 17 hours’ interrogation while officers kept threatening, beating and torturing him with electric shocks.
On February 8th, Zaki was brought to a public prosecutor’s office, who ordered 15 days’ detention for pending investigation. From that day his detention has been renewed many times for additional 15 days at the beginning and then again for a further 45 days, until now.
This terrible event provoked many reactions by international communities, that protested for his release in many ways, everyone tried to raise their voice for this deplorable attack against human rights.
Our personal goal is to gather the most representative production about this event in a clear linked open data environment. We decided to focus on this historical event of abuse on human freedom because we strongly believe in the importance of the same ideals of justice that Patrick tried to normalize in his country.
We must talk about this story. We must do it aloud.
We chose the ten items we found the most expressive about the key concept of the detention of Patrick Zaki. For describing this event in an all-around perspective, we dealt with 4 different conceptual paths: the first explores the emotional point of view on the case, through the eyes of artists, that created visual artworks and music; the second is about contextual information on the environment involving Patrick in the past and in the present, with the item of the Master’s website he studied for and the building in which his detention is going on; then we explored a socio-political path, analyzing al-Sisi’s Government and Tora prison conditions through the objective eye of the reports by Human Rights Watch and one podcast from Italian Radio RAI. Lastly, we dealt with legal production about the event, working on the resolution made by the European Parliament and the Petition signed by Scholars at Risk.
We explored the possible technologies used in Semantic Web, such as vocabularies, ontologies, RDF and URIs. The aim of the project is to model a coherent linked open data project that will connect concepts, items, people, institutions and places involving the detention of Patrick Zaki, in order to display a semantically meaningful environment in the most integrated way possible.
