Crispin Blunt on the Death of Mohamed Morsi

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Tell me about the parliamentary panel.

CRISPIN BLUNT, BRITISH CONSERVATIVE MP: Well, I was asked to put a panel together to look at the conditions under which Mohamed Morsi was being detained. And I selected Lord Edward Faulks to join me, who is a Conservative former justice minister. Certainly, wouldn’t be seen as a blanching liberal by any standards. He’s also now a judge. And my labor colleague, Dr. Paul Williams, who is a practicing GP, continues to practice whilst he’s in the House of Commons. But importantly, before coming into the House of Commons, he had inspected and checked victims of torture for human rights organizations in the United Kingdom to validate their claims on medical grounds.

AMANPOUR: So, you are claiming that the government of Egypt could be headed up on torture charges?

BLUNT: Well, so — what I then put together was what I thought a panel that ought to give confidence to the Egyptians that we were going to do any review of his conditions fairly. As much as anything else, it was an opportunity for them to, obviously, let us see the conditions. And if they were going to let us go and look, they might improve the conditions that we are being reported to us, which was the cause of the inquiry in the first place. But we got no communication for our — to our requests from the Egyptian government to go and have a look. So, we then looked to all the evidence that was available to us remotely in order to put together our report, which we did in march 2018.

AMANPOUR: And we’ll get to that. But you were slightly prescient because in march 2018, I mean, you wrote that unless things change — and I think you said it could lead to Morsi’s death.

BLUNT: We did very so. We said that if his — if he continued not to receive the medical treatment he needed and he continued to be held in what appeared to be an — on the evidence available to were the most demeaning, difficult conditions, 23 hours of solitude, very difficult for him to raise the attention —

AMANPOUR: Per day.

BLUNT: — of his — per day — to raise the attention of his waters. If he was ill. There were occasions where he had gone into a diabetic coma whilst in the cell. No mattress, only two blankets to sleep on or around and no proper communication. Only three family visits in six years is woefully below any kind of national standard, below the standard any ordinary Egyptian in custody would expect. And for a former president of Egypt, indeed the only properly democratically elected president of Egypt, standards which I don’t think reflect well on Egypt at all.