Egypt rejects UN rights investigator criticism

The report, based on a fact-finding mission in Egypt last April, highlighted that administrative detention orders repealed by the judicial system in the country are often “renewed immediately upon a person’s release or, in the worst case, just ignored through unacknowledged detention until a new order of official administrative detention is obtained.”

It also said there was concern over the Emergency Law as it is applied to situations and persons “where there is no link to terrorist activity” and this results in the arrest and imprisonment of political activists and bloggers via military courts and special state security tribunals.

The Egyptian government, according to a press release from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), has denied all of the “substantial observations by claiming that the Emergency Law does not suspend or limit ordinary laws or judicial oversight despite clear legal clauses that do precisely this.”

Moataz El Fegiery, CIHRS Executive Director said that “today the Special Rapporteur confirmed what human rights defenders have been warning about for several years: the proposed counter-terrorism law in Egypt is an attempt by the government to normalize the state of emergency and undermine the constitutional protection of fundamental rights.”

”Egyptian officials did everything they could to limit the scope of the Special Rapporteur’s mission: they barred him from visiting prisons and interviewing detainees and refused to let him observe any terrorism trials or meet with families of victims and detainees” said Hossam Bahgat of the EIPR. “But the facts are clear, and the mission report provides the most damning assessment of systemic human rights abuses committed in the name of security since 1981.”

Both organizations have urged the Egyptian government to implement the recommendations of the report and to “lift the State of Emergency, to abolish the recently added Article 179 of the Constitution on combating terrorism and to ensure that any existing and future anti-terrorism law complies with all international human rights standards. ”

They also added that the government should allow Scheinin to return to Egypt in order to have a follow-up mission that has already been requested. He was barred from visiting detention facilities during his last visit to Egypt, the NGOs said.

On 9 March, the EIPR and CIHRS in collaboration with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Federation for Human Rights will organize a side panel discussion in Geneva with the participation of the Special Rapporteur.

The panel discussion is entitled: “Human Rights in Egypt: Counter-terrorism and the Price of ‘Stability’.”