Egypt: European politicians urge UN to monitor rights abuses
Close to 200 frontline European politicians signed a letter on Thursday calling on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on Egypt to address the country's "human rights crisis".
The letter, signed by 175 MPs from across the continent, urged the UNHRC to take “resolute action” ahead of the council's upcoming session in March.
It accused the international community of a “persistent failure to take any meaningful action to address Egypt’s human rights crisis.”
“This failure, along with continued support to the Egyptian government and reluctance to even speak up against pervasive abuses has only deepened the Egyptian authorities’ sense of impunity," it said.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, an army general, came to power after leading a military coup against his democratically-elected predecessor Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
Local and international rights groups have called out the Sisi government for overseeing the worst crackdown on human rights in the country’s modern history.
Tens of thousands of Sisi’s critics languish in jails, and many have been tortured, forcibly disappeared or forced to live in exile for fear of repression.
The European MPs denounced the Sisi government’s declaration regarding a human rights strategy and steps taken to ameliorate abuses, calling it “an effort to whitewash their dismal human rights record" that was "unlikely to have any significant impact on Egypt’s human rights crisis.”
The human rights strategy, the MPs said, was “drafted in an untransparent manner and without consultation with independent human rights organisations, overlooks grave past and ongoing human rights concerns such as the prolonged arbitrary detention of peaceful critics, enforced disappearances, and torture in detention facilities, and it fails to identify concrete steps to hold those responsible to account”.
The European MPs named political prisoners Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy, Zyad el-Elaimy, Ibrahim Ezz el-Din, Haytham Mohamdeen, Hoda Abdelmoneim, Abdel Nasser Salama, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and Mohamed al-Baqer as examples of those detained arbitrarily.
They referred to Morsi and filmmaker Shady Habash as cases of deaths in custody as a result of poor prison conditions.
'Long overdue'
Human Rights Watch, along with several other international rights groups, has jointly called for the establishment of the mechanism in the past, according to the organisation’s EU advocate Claudio Francavilla.
The mechanism, Francavilla told Middle East Eye, is long-overdue.
The letter by MPs, he said, “shows broad, cross-party, cross-national support by parliamentarians across Europe, whose call for action stands in stark contrast with inaction by their governments.”
He added that the letter provides a counter-narrative to the Cairo government’s promotion of alleged improvements in human rights.
“Willful inaction by the international community and support for Sisi’s iron fist rule have emboldened the Egyptian government’s sense of near total impunity,” Francavilla said.
“Parliamentarians from across Europe are making the right call: governments need to act and take long-overdue steps to ensure UN scrutiny over Egypt’s horrendous human rights crisis.”
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