The African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights should act decisively to address the dire, protracted human rights crisis in ![]()
Egypt following its review of
the situation in the country, 22 organizations said today. The commission has found Egypt in
breach of numerous articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights but has not
adopted a resolution on Egypt since 2015, despite the severe deterioration of Egypt’s human
rights situation and the near-complete destruction of civic space.
The African Commission reviewed Egypt’s situation during its 85th session in October, with the
government presenting a ![]()
report covering 2019 to 2024. The report included false depictions of
the human rights situation in Egypt and a blanket denial of abuses. The Commission’s Country
Rapporteur for Egypt also presented a report, which omitted widespread abuses and largely
adopted government narratives.
“The Egyptian government painted a rosy picture of the dire human rights crisis in Egypt, while
the African Commission’s Country Rapporteur adopted some of its narratives without scrutiny,
dangerously amplifying it,” said Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian
Commission for Rights and Freedoms. “These misrepresentations make it all the more important
for the commission to robustly address Egypt’s human rights crisis, the worst in decades.”
Flagrant and systematic human rights abuses in Egypt have been well documented in numerous
reports by independent Egyptian and international human rights organizations, ![]()
United Nations
and ![]()
African human rights ![]()
mechanisms, and even the government-appointed ![]()
National Council on
Human Rights, the organizations said.
The Egyptian ![]()
government claimed in its report that it has no detained journalists or prisoners of
conscience and that restrictions imposed on independent organizations, such as prohibiting them
from conducting and publishing studies without permission, are to ensure “![]()
transparency and
objectivity.”
In ![]()
public sessions, the African Commission’s Country Rapporteur for Egypt rarely raised the
acute human rights crisis and allegations of widespread abuses. She ![]()
asserted that the 2023
presidential elections were held in a “peaceful” and “competitive” environment, contradicting
well-documented ![]()
evidence of ![]()
repression, prosecutions targeting potential candidates and their
family members, and Egypt’s effective criminalization of assembly, expression, and association.
The Country Rapporteur has ![]()
asked the government to host an African Commission session in
Egypt, without raising any concerns over the pervasive surveillance, security forces abuses, and
crackdown on protesters. The repression has long been on display, including during the African
conference in Egypt in ![]()
2022.
In December 2024, the Country Rapporteur made an unannounced official visit to Egypt, which
she described as an “information (familiarization) and advocacy visit.” However, she apparently
did not meet with any independent human rights organizations before, during, or after the visit.
In May 2025, the Rapporteur published a report from the visit, which is no longer available on
the commission’s website, repeating government narratives unchallenged such as that “any
person accused in a criminal case is entitled to all the rights stipulated in international
conventions, especially the right to defense.” Many international and Egyptian ![]()
human rights
groups have raised concerns regarding the Rapporteur’s visit and report publicly and in letters to
the African Commission.
In the period covered by the Commission’s review, the Egyptian government has adopted a ![]()
zero-
tolerance policy toward dissent, virtually ![]()
eliminated public space, and effectively criminalized
the rights to ![]()
freedom of speech, ![]()
assembly, and ![]()
association. ![]()
Tens of thousands of ![]()
activists,
and ![]()
academics have been detained or prosecuted merely for exercising their rights. The
government ![]()
has harassed, detained, and prosecuted family members of critics, ![]()
including critics
living abroad.
Dangerously ![]()
abusive constitutional amendments introduced in 2019 have severely undermined
the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, and further inserted the military into public
and political life in unprecedented ways. New laws have further undermined basic rights, such as
the ![]()
2019 law on associations and the ![]()
2024 asylum law. The government has failed to
meaningfully amend existing abusive laws, such as the ![]()
2013 law restricting peaceful assembly,
the ![]()
2018 cybercrimes law, the ![]()
2018 media regulation law; and the ![]()
2015 counterterrorism laws.
The government has also failed to fulfill socioeconomic rights. Spending on education has
effectively been reduced to the lowest level in many years. The government’s ![]()
budget allocation
for health care is well below the constitutional minimum and international benchmarks. Cash
assistance programs ![]()
cover fewer than one third of those living in or near poverty, even according
to official numbers.
The dire human rights crisis in Egypt has warranted four African Commission ![]()
resolutions since
2013, in which ![]()
it denounced violations such as the “severe restrictions imposed on journalists
and media practitioners and their arbitrary arrest, detention and killing for carrying out their
work,” as well as “disregard to regional and international fair trial standards, the unlawful
imposition of mass death sentences.” The Egyptian ![]()
government has failed to implement the vast
majority of recommendations in these resolutions. International and Egyptian organizations met
with several members of the African Commission during its 85th session to raise these human
rights concerns. Several commissioners reflected a number of concerns in their public
interventions.
Egypt has further ![]()
failed to implement several final decisions in which the commission found it to
be in breach of its obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
including ![]()
three decisions adopted during the period under review since 2019.
The African Commission should take robust, decisive measures to highlight the ongoing human
rights crisis in Egypt and protect the rights of Egyptians, the organizations said. It should ensure
that the current review and concluding observations include an evidence-based assessment of
Egypt’s human rights crisis and issue public statements, urgent appeals, and letters to the
government raising systematic abuses and the need to repeal and amend abusive laws.
In light of the government’s failure to implement the commission’s previous resolutions on
Egypt, it should issue a new resolution calling for investigations of abuses, accountability, and
reparations for victims. The African Commission should also establish a follow-up mechanism
under its Rule 112 to monitor Egypt’s implementation of recommendations and to engage with
victims, civil society, and the state on concrete remedial actions. The commission, through its
Working Group on Communications, must urgently address Egypt’s failure to implement
remedies ordered in final decisions on individual cases, and refer the matter to the African Union
Executive Council.
It should use its early-warning mandate under Article 58 of the African Charter on Human and
Peoples’ Rights to draw the African Union Peace and Security Council’s attention to the
deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt, particularly the risk of mass violations linked to
impunity in detention and counterterrorism operations.
The African Commission should publicly commit to monitoring and speaking out about any such
threats or restrictions. It should ensure that any country visit includes sufficient consultation with
victims of abuses and Egyptian and international human rights organizations as well as credible
government guarantees of confidentiality and safety for all those involved.
In case there is a bid to hold a session in Egypt, the African Commission should require the
government to offer concrete guarantees that it would uphold and protect the safety and freedoms
of all participants and the media. Participants must be able to freely enter the country and the
government must not create adverse consequences or retaliate for any involvement with the
session. Critical Egyptian organizations must be allowed access without intimidation or reprisals.
“The African Commission has plenty of tools it can use to highlight and address the dire human
rights situation in Egypt and ongoing flagrant abuses,” said ![]()
Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and
North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “At the very least, the Commission should
ensure that the government narrative is properly scrutinized.”
Signatories:
1.Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
2.Committee for Justice
3.Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)
4.Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms
5.Egyptian Front for Human Rights
6.Egyptian Human Rights Forum (EHRF)
7.Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
8.EgyptWide for Human Rights
9.El Nadim Center
10.Euromed Rights Network
11.Hraak for Change and Youth Empowerment
12.Human Rights Watch
13.HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement
14.International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), in the framework of the Observatory
for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
15.International-Lawyers.Org
16.Law and Democracy Support Foundation e.V. (LDSF)
17.Ligue tunisienne des droits de l’homme
18.REDRESS
19.Refugees Platform in Egypt – RPE
20.Sinai Foundation for Human Rights
21.Their Right – To Defend Prisoners of Conscience
22.World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), in the framework of the Observatory for
the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
For media inquires or more information please contact: [email protected]
