The application for leave to appeal was registered on 12 February 2020 under the no. 1372, and on Thursday 13 the prosecution accepted the application and set a hearing session on February 15 to look into the appeal itself.
Press Releases & News
The first of these papers, published today in Arabic (translation forthcoming), documents the most egregious and disproportionate of these measures which has become a routine practice (in particular circumstances) for the police: forced searches of personal mobile phones during arbitrary stop and search operations. This measure has no legal basis at all in Egyptian law, not even in the context of declared emergency. The paper provides a brief narrative of how this practice has evolved from October 2019 and until the end of January 2020.
EIPR demands the immediate release of Patrick George Zaki and an end to continued harassment and arbitrary detention of human rights professionals, members of civil society groups and journalists.
The Anti-FGM Taskforce is sadened and angered by the death of Nada, a 12-year-old girl, in the village of al-Hawatka in Assiut governorate. The girl died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM), at the private clinic of an obstetrician-gynecologist on Wednesday, 29 January 2020
The lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights filed suit before the Administrative Court against the interior minister and the director of the Travel and Immigration Department, both in their official capacity. The suit is seeking an expedited stay on the passive decision of the Interior Ministry’s Travel and Immigration Department to refuse to permit Ahmed Harqan to travel abroad
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said that three years after its adoption, the church construction law has failed to end violations of Christians’ right to worship and address related sectarian tensions. It criticized the security apparatus for shutting down church buildings and thereby prohibiting many Copts in Egyptian villages from engaging in collective worship.
It is worth noting that the State Security Prosecution has recently developed a habit of throwing a lot of people who are mainly targeted because of their political inclinations into large cauldron cases with a long list of accusations and a huge number of defendants; defendants who do not necessarily have any links or anything in common, and on charges of incidents that are not only unrelated but that do not even have any intersection time or area wise.
We stress on that the source of this serious issue is the absence of a legislation that activates the constitutional article, without disruption to the rest of the constitutional articles that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and guarantee freedom of belief for all without discrimination, as well as the vagueness of the current legal system which opens the door to a such serious violation.
EIPR expresses extreme shock at the death of former president Mohamed Morsi as a result of the failure of Egyptian authorities to provide him necessary medical treatment. The wilful failure to provide adequate health care amounts to murder by neglect, according to the Egyptian penal code as well as international human rights standards.
EIPR condemns closure of the Naga al-Ghafir church in Sohag by security and documents closure of 22 churches since enactment of the church construction law; demands reopening of closed churches and a decree regularizing the status of all churches that filed papers with the regularization committee
The Prisons’ Authority forced al-Helw to undergo a full external physical examination and inspection of her genitals, conducted by doctors at a general hospital, against her will and without medical grounds, which constitutes a clear assault on her bodily and psychological safety.
The EIPR condemns the Interior Ministry for holding al-Kashef in the Tora men’s prison in solitary confinement pending investigation in case no. 1739/2018. Detaining Malak, who is a transwoman, in a male prison facility makes her more vulnerable to physical and psychological violence.
On March 19, 2019, the State Security Prosecution renewed the detention of Malak El Kashef for 15 days pending investigations in case No. 1739/2018. The defendant’s lawyers filed requests to investigate the anal examination ElKashef was subjected to during her detention, which constitutes a flagrant violation of her right to bodily integrity.
The campaign also seeks to destigmatize menstruation and present sanitary products as a basic bodily/health need for women.
Gasser Abdel-Razek, EIPR’s executive director, attended today a civil society business lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron, his foreign minister, Jean-Yves La Drian, and other members of the delegation accompanying the French President during his visit to Egypt.
The EIPR believes that such a decree would most faithfully enact the provisions of the church construction law, however flawed, as well as treat the causes of sectarian violence, which is largely rooted in bureaucratic obstruction and clear recalcitrance on the part of the security apparatus.
The Egyptian Initiative calls for an immediate stop of this campaign and stresses the need to respect the rights of those accused in accordance with constitutional and legal guarantees at all stages of the investigation and trial
What happened in Dimshaw Hashim is not a unique case, but a recurrent pattern in a number of governorates that has been going on recently, manifested in closing a number of existing churches and them being unable to settle their legal status.
INCLO further believes that women and girls have the right of access to appropriate health care services to ensure safe pregnancy and childbirth. The ability of women and girls to decide whether and when to become a parent is a necessary precondition for the achievement of gender equality in all aspects of cultural, economic and political life.
This most recent incident confirms the fears of numerous women’s groups and rights organizations about the continued risk to the lives and health of girls, the inadequacy of the protection provided by the law, and the short-sightedness of a statutory philosophy based on stricter penalties while disregarding the social tolerance of female circumcision.