Career
She has been organizing peaceful protests and supports activities for political prisoners, using social media to denounce human rights violations. El-Massry was sentenced to two years in prison for violating Egypt’s controversial protest law before having her sentence reduced to six months. The young activist had participated in a protest on December 3, 2013 to call for justice and retribution for Khaled Saeed, the man who was tortured to death in June 2010 and later became one of the symbols of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.
She was released in September 2014, only to be sentenced on a different charge, in May 2015, when under the Morsi presidency, El-Massry and a group of lawyers started a sit-in in front of El-Raml police station in Alexandria, demanding an official apology from the Ministry of Interior regarding the injury of their fellow lawyer at the hands of police personnel.
The lawyers were then arrested and accused of attempting to break into the police station. An acquittal hearing for El-Massry and her colleagues was made in December 2015 but was unsuccessful.
She was the second person to be awarded the international award while in prison since Nelson Mandela in 1985.