Joint advocacy factsheet on Egypt with the Tahrir Institute

Ahead of Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) pre-session, we've produced an advocacy factsheet with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

The factsheet complements the joint stakeholder report that we published in March 2019 as part of the UPR process.

The UPR is a mechanism of the United Nations created to examine the human rights performance of all United Nations member states.

Egypt’s UPR is set to take place on November 13, 2019.

Egypt’s UPR pre-session, which took place on 9 October 2019, presented an opportunity for stakeholders to engage with states in conversations about Egypt’s human rights record in the lead-up to the UPR.

Our international human rights adviser, Dr Marina Brilman, spoke on the panel of Egypt’s pre-session at the United Nations in Geneva on the lack of judicial independence.

Much like the joint stakeholder report, the factsheet traces the consolidation of authoritarian rule through legislation, as well as the crackdown on members of the legal profession and civil society.

The factsheet assesses Egypt’s failure to adhere to its commitments from the previous UPR cycle. It focuses on:

• lack of judicial and prosecutorial independence
• military jurisdiction, state security emergency courts, special circuit terrorism courts, and lack of fair trial guarantees
• breakdown of the rule of law and legislation introduced by the executive
• use of the Counter-terrorism Law, the Protest Law, the NGO Law, the Media Law, the Cybercrime Law, and the Penal Code to harass, arrest, and prosecute lawyers and human rights defenders
• examples of arrest, detention, death in custody, and enforced disappearance of lawyers and human rights defenders