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.
Programs: Economic and Social Justice
1 Sep 2020
The following points attempt to draw a picture of the labor market in Egypt, and point out its key shortcomings and imbalances, which are exacerbated with the crisis of Covid-19. The crisis, at the same time, opens a door for discussion and redress for some of these imbalances. The Egyptian law allows any employer to fire his employees, without any compensation or pension. When a worker gets sick, and he is the provider for his family, he often does not have health insurance that guarantees his treatment.
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.
The proposal was prepared in cooperation with the Ministry of Health and Population in 2014 and stresses the basic conditions for ensuring the formation of a council that will achieve a radical and sustainable reform of the governance of the health care system. EIPR stresses the importance of respecting these conditions while working on the law proposal. Through this paper, EIPR presents again the proposed law submitted in 2014, an explanation of it and a proposal for its formation and mechanisms of action.
The research provides recommendations by the Right to Health Program of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. These recommendations are for relevant authorities, the most important of which is to transparently make accurate information available, disaggregated especially by geographical division of infection rates and available numbers of clinical tests.
10 May 2020
The purpose of these investigations is to provide relevant stakeholders and authorities with data regarding the community in order to better shape policy and decision making. The purpose of these investigations is to provide relevant stakeholders and authorities with data regarding the community in order to better shape policy and decision making.
The EIPR is monitoring actions by the government and Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to mitigate the economic and social impact of preventive measures to combat the spread of COVID-19. We are assessing such action in light of the protection of citizens’ lives, health, and income and the imperative not to endanger workers’ health and lives for the sake of running the economy at full capacity.
The Egyptian initiative for personal rights publishes the text of a letter sent by international mental health professionals to the Health Committee of the Egyptian Parliament, the Secretariat for Mental Health and the Ministry of Health, prior to the discussion of new amendments to the Mental Health Law in Parliament on December 12.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights warned today that some of the amendments to the mental health law proposed by the government—in particular, those related to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—violate the rights of patients to treatment and physical safety.
These drastic economic measures are taking place alongside a severe crackdown on civil and political rights. Egypt’s civic space has been decisively evaluated as “closed” by international monitoring initiatives, and the government has recently ratified an NGO law that UN human rights experts have indicated could “devastate civil society.”
