Through a postcard campaign, the Orde van Vlaamse Balies (OVB) offers support to Hoda Abdel Moneim, a human rights lawyer who has been unjustly imprisoned in Egypt since 2018. Her career has been dedicated to defending the rule of law and protecting fundamental rights. As the OVB states: “Hoda’s story reminds us how special it is that we can practice our profession freely and independently, even in a world where the rule of law is no longer a given.”
At the OVB Congress on April 24, postcards written by Flemish lawyers for Hoda were presented to her daughter, Gehad Khaled. This was done by OVB Rule of Law board member Nadia van Baelen, who used this moment to reflect on the protection of the rule of law and the position of lawyers worldwide.
The postcards collected by the OVB.
With this initiative, the OVB supports Lawyers for Lawyers’ #FreeTheLawyers Campaign, which aims to raise public awareness and provide support for lawyers serving long prison sentences due to their professional work. Hoda is one of the five lawyers for whom Lawyers for Lawyers is campaigning in 2026.
During a live radio broadcast at the Congress, Gehad and Juliette Auffret from Lawyers for Lawyers spoke with radio maker Linde Merckpoel about Hoda’s situation and what we as a community can do to support her. As Juliette says:
“Hoda was working on all these human rights cases. Unfortunately, what we have seen is that the Egyptian government is quite prone to trying to arrest and stop human rights defenders and lawyers when they become too political in their sense, which means they are acting on too sensitive cases defending political prisoners, journalists, human rights in general. I think it was just an accumulation which meant that in 2018 […] she was forcibly disappeared before she was actually arrested and charged on terrorist charges, which have been found to be framed as completely arbitrary by the international community […].”
🔗 Watch the interview here.
