At midnight on Nov. 23, 2019, Egyptian state security broke into a young Coptic activist’s home and arrested him without a warrant, confiscating his phone, laptop, camera, and personal documents. They interrogated him without a lawyer and reportedly tortured him on suspicion of joining a terror group, receiving foreign funding, funding a terrorist organization, broadcasting false information, and using social media for the purpose of committing a crime. Today this Coptic activist, Ramy Kamil, is under pretrial detention in Egypt’s Tora Prison.

I first met Kamil in 2010 when I was part of an ambitious new think tank founded to look at Egypt’s problems through the lens of classical liberalism. Back when there was active civil society in Egypt, young activists like Kamil and me would often meet to discuss the best ways to advocate for Coptic rights in Egypt.