Director of Egyptian NGO monitoring torture vows to fight closure

The director of Egypt's only independent torture monitor has vowed to carry on the organisation's work unless she is arrested.

Egypt's health ministry issued an order to close the Cairo-based Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the health ministry said the organisation, which documents allegations of torture, death and medical negligence inside police stations and prisons, was holding "activities other than the activity allowed in its permit," but did not specify the nature of these activities.

But Aida Seif el-Dawla, who helped found the organisation 23 years ago, told Middle East Eye that the closure is purely political and part of the state's wider crackdown on civil society leaders and human rights defenders.

"Smaller centres have been closed. Human rights centres have been banned for travel," she said on Thursday. "It’s part of a crackdown and it's our turn now."

The centre, she said, has managed to postpone the closure until they meet with the health ministry on Sunday to understand its reasoning, and she confirmed that she plans to keep working unless she is arrested.

Dawla said the centre,  which helps victims of torture rehabilitate and also supports for victims of domestic violence, is the only one of its kind in the country and its clients would struggle to find help elsewhere if Nadeem is closed.

"The government doesn't care," she said. "It is torturing people to break them. Apparently, they are not interested in people helping those victims." 

Amnesty International said that moves to close down the centre "appear to mark an expansion of the ongoing crackdown on human rights activists in Egypt".

Said Boumedouha, the rights group's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, called on Egypt to "freeze the order to close the centre and provide it with a clear explanation of the reasons behind the order." 

The centre "must be given an opportunity to challenge the order before a court," he said.

It "provides a lifeline to hundreds of victims of torture and the families of people who have been subjected to enforced disappearance," he said. 

"This looks to us like a barefaced attempt to shut down an organisation which has been a bastion for human rights and a thorn in the side of the authorities for more than 20 years."

Five years after police brutality sparked the revolution that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak, human rights groups are again denouncing deaths in police stations, arbitrary arrests and the disappearances of opponents of the government.

Since the army ousted Muslim Brotherhood-backed president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, authorities have launched a brutal crackdown on his supporters that has seen hundreds killed and tens of thousands jailed.

Secular activists who took part in the 2011 revolt have also been imprisoned.