The recent developments also come as a direct response to our activities in the field of international advocacy, and in particular our meetings with a number of diplomatic missions, the most recent of which was a meeting held at EIPR’s headquarters on November 3rd with 13 ambassadors and accredited diplomats, who discussed ways to improve human rights conditions in Egypt.
Press Releases & News
In an unprecedented escalation for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a security force arrested Mohamed Bashseer, the Administrative Manager at EIPR from his home after midnight on Sunday the 15th and detained him for more than 12 hours
And because monitoring clinical trial procedures in general, and this important experiment in particular, is part of the role of civil society, a member of the EIPR team volunteered and joined this clinical trial. He followed the procedures and was registered among the trial participants after completing and fulfilling the conditions for participation.
By the end of October 2020, the justice system in Egypt had carried out the largest number of executions (in different cases of a varying nature) since it began its expansion of the application of death penalty in the last five years. A total of 53 people were executed during the course of October, the last of these executions took place on October 28 when four convicts were executed in a judgement related to the killing of 17 people in a nightclub fire in Agouza.
EIPR will be advocating and supporting the adoption of all global policies that would ensure equitable access to medications, technologies and information for all, during this pandemic and beyond as part of its continuous quest to ensure the insurance of the Right to Health for all.
Egypt has missed that opportunity, so far, according to the paper published by EIPR, on October the 17th, titled: "Four flaws: Assessing the Egyptian-IMF energy subsidies reform". The publication coincides with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The paper depends on the principle: "clean energy guaranteed to all at reasonable prices", which is the seventh goal of the sustainable development goals that the Egyptian state adopted and is supposed to achieve (Egypt 2030).
Everyone has the right to life-saving interventions during or outside of crises.[ii] And yet, women and girls’ rights to bodily autonomy and safe abortion have been some of the first rights to be conveniently sacrificed under the guise of prioritizing COVID, as if health was a zero-sum game. That includes free, safe and legal abortion and comprehensive abortion and post-abortion care, without which women, girls and gender-non-conforming persons are forced to seek unsafe clandestine abortions or to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, in complete violation of our rights.
EIPR hopes that the prosecution’s decision not to proceed with the referral of Menna Abdel Aziz to trial is a precedent that will be generalized to the rest of sexual violence cases, through the prosecution’s use of its inherent right to suspend investigations or counter-reports that the victim of sexual violence may face once they report the incidents of abuse.
EIPR also warns of the danger of using Article 27 of the Law to Combat Electronic Crimes issued in 2018 to target the same spectrum of non-traditional ideas and trends, under the pretext of “misuse of social media.” Last June as well.
EIPR had previously and repeatedly warned that the precedent of accusations being brought against a victim and survivor of rape and kidnapping sends a clear message to women and girls that reporting sexual assaults they are subjected to, may end up in them being charged as accused and lead them to prison, hindering any community efforts seeking to support women and girls in their quest to recover from the aftermath of sexual violence crimes that they may be exposed to.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) condemns the verdict passed in absentia by the Fifth Circuit of the Criminal Court (terrorism felonies) with 15 years’ imprisonment for Bahey El Din Hassan, founder of Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and one of the pioneers of Egyptian human rights work throughout its history.
EIPR calls upon the Public Prosecution again to use its authority, and to take the decision best suited for the safety of the victim, Menna Abdel Aziz (Aya), to drop all charges against her and release her immediately, so that she can begin recovering from the psychological and physical effects of the attacks that she was subjected to at the hands of the accused.
In the year of the pandemic, as the World Health Organization called it last March, when millions lose their jobs and their basic living, the government chooses to cut spending on food subsidies. Despite the exhaustion of the health system, headed by doctors and nurses in government hospitals, the government chose to complete its neglect of the constitutional minimum spending on health.
Once again the prison administration failed to transfer Patrick Zaki citing a force majeure event. Patrick was scheduled for a detention renewal session on Sunday June 28 that was meant to take place for the first time before a Criminal Court panel from a counter-terrorism circuit, which sits at the Tora Subofficers Training Institute. But once again we saw a repeat of what has become the norm over the last three months, following the April 28 decision by the head of the Cairo Appellate Court to resume detention renewal sessions without the presence of defendants in criminal cases
The court did not allow the lawyers to obtain the case file and only allowed them to see it quickly, and the case documents did not include any specific publications published by the defendants that would qualify as promoting Shiite doctrine, while the accusation articles included article 98 (f) of the Penal Code known as “contempt of religions” that punishes "promoting extremist ideas that ridicule divinely-revealed religions."
This ruling comes in a broader context of prosecutions and trials for online expression in general, and for religious expression in particular, and includes a wide range of persecuting of unconventional Islamic ideas such as criticism of some of the revered traditional figures of Sunni Islam, or the expression of ideas of non-Sunni Islamic sects such as Shiites, Ahmadiyya and the Quranites, in addition to expressing atheistic ideas or declaring unbelief and criticizing religions.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) called on the Ministry of Interior and the Prisons Authority to assume their legal responsibility in providing the simplest forms of human contact in light of the continued suspension of visits for prisoners’ families, consistent with the rights stipulated in the Prison Regulation Law. EIPR demanded that the ministry and the Prisons Authority allow detainees and prisoners to communicate with their families and lawyers.
In a statement yesterday, the Public Prosecution announced the transfer of Menna Abdel Aziz (Aya) to a Ministry of Social Solidarity shelter hosting victims of abus
The undersigned family members of victims of police killings and civil society organizations from around the world, call on member states of the UN Human Rights Council to urgently convene a Special Session on the situation of human rights in the United States in order to respond to the unfolding grave human rights crisis borne out of the repression of nationwide protests. The recent protests erupted on May 26 in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was only one of a recent string of unlawful killings of unarmed Black people by police and armed white vigilantes.
INCLO calls on police in the USA to adopt clear regulations on the use of force and less-lethal weapons in the context of protest which conform with the recent UN Guidance on Less Lethal Weapons.It is well established that the use of violence by some protesters does not suspend the right to protest of all those gathered and it doesn’t provide a license to escalate police responses and use of excessive or deadly force.
