Mohamed Seif Eldin-Cairo
Twenty Egyptian and international human rights organizations denounced the invitation of French President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to attend the G7 summit due to Cairo's record of human rights violations and the nationalization of civil society.
Sisi is scheduled to attend the G7 summit, which begins on Saturday and ends on August 26.
The undersigned organizations called on Macron to press Sisi to drop all charges against human rights defenders and journalists arbitrarily detained and unconditionally release them, as well as to drop police surveillance procedures and immediately release political detainees.
During his visit to Cairo in January 2019, Macron criticized the ongoing human rights crisis in Egypt.
They also demanded a retrial of political detainees held in unfair trial procedures, in accordance with measures that comply with Egypt's obligations under international human rights law, a moratorium on executions, an investigation of all cases of enforced disappearance, and an end to torture.
Egypt, as the organizations say in its joint statement, is experiencing an escalating human rights crisis, which has led to major setbacks on the path of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, association and the press, and the political sphere has become extremely restrictive, especially for political parties.
The signatory organizations are: Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Egyptian Forum for Human Rights, Egyptian Front for Human Rights, Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms, Andalus Center, Arab Network for Knowledge of Human Rights, Center for Law and Justice Studies in Arab Societies, and French-Egyptian Initiative for Rights and Freedoms.
The statement was also signed by the Mena Association for Human Rights, the Justice Committee, the Freedom Initiative, the Global Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICAS), the Euro-Mediterranean Network of Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture, and the French League for Human Rights (LDH), Front Line Defenders, World Organization Against Torture, as well as Reporters Without Borders.
On Tuesday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights announced the postponement of the regional conference on the criminalization of torture, which was scheduled to be held in Cairo on 4 and 5 September next, in partnership with the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, due to harsh criticism by Egyptian and international human rights organizations.
Wholesale violations
Since the overthrow of the late President Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013, and the human rights file in Egypt slope, according to the description of human rights.
Earlier this month, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (Civil Society) issued a report entitled "The Nightmare of Torture in Egypt: Legal and Judicial Obstacles to Redress Victims of Torture", documenting 86 cases of torture in detention facilities, from June 2017 to June. June 2018.
The abuses have not only stopped torture inside detention centers, but also amounted to extrajudicial killings, as the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Britain documented in a report entitled "Five years of oppression and subjugation" 3,110 extrajudicial killings since the military coup to July / July 2018.
In Sinai, the civilian death toll was 4,010, of whom 3,709 the army said were killed as a result of security confrontations. The rest were killed indiscriminately, without opening an investigation into one incident.
One of the cases of extrajudicial killings is medical negligence inside prisons, where since the beginning of this year about 25 detainees have died inside their prison, according to the correspondent of Al Jazeera Net.
In January, Adalah's Center for Rights and Freedoms (Civil Society) released a report titled "How to Treat a Prisoner to Death," which noted that the number of medical neglect in prisons between 2016 and 2018 amounted to 819.