American lawmakers accused Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of interfering in the work of the American judicial system, after the Egyptian authorities arrested members of the family of Muhammad Sultan al-Masri, the American human rights defender, and considered the arrests an attempt to disrupt the litigation process in America against senior Egyptian officials.
Foreign Policy magazine said that members of the House of Representatives led by Republican Representative Tom Malinowski called in a letter to them, Sisi and Yasser Reda, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States to release the members of the Sultan’s family and affirm Sultan’s right to sue former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawy under American law.
Pressure
This move by members of the House of Representatives comes as part of private and public pressure to compel Egypt to release the father and Sultan's cousins who were arrested after Sultan filed a lawsuit last month in which he accused al-Beblawy and other officials of issuing an arrest warrant in 2013 and sentencing him to life imprisonment and attempting to kill him outside Eliminate torture and ill-treatment during the 21 months he spent in detention.
Sultan had spent two years in prison in Egypt and was released and returned to the United States.
According to Human Rights Watch, Foreign Policy, says Sultan's cousins have been detained since June 15. American lawmakers said that the measures taken by the Egyptian security forces can only be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the dismissal of the lawsuit.
A spokesman for Senator Chris Koons told the magazine that Koones and Senator Marco Rubio sent a letter urging Egypt to stop harassing the Sultan's family. Sultan announced that his father - who was a member of the government of the late Mohamed Morsi, the only elected president in the history of Egypt - had been summoned a few days ago for investigation and had not known him until today.
The magazine said that although foreign leaders are immune to civil suits in American courts in most cases, Sultan managed to file a lawsuit against Beblawy, who recently moved to McLean, Virginia, after joining the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund as a representative of Egypt.
She explained that Sultan was able to file a lawsuit under the Torture Victims Protection Act, a law that allows the United States to prosecute foreign officials accused of torture or extrajudicial killing.
Sisi, Kamel et al
Cairo responded by hiring American lawyers, and demanded that the US State Department grant al-Beblawy diplomatic immunity as its representative to the fund "as long as the allegations were made during his tenure as Egyptian premier."
The lawsuit also names Al-Sisi and the current head of intelligence in Egypt, Abbas Kamel, that they are liable to prosecute if they travel to the United States, along with three former leaders of the Ministry of Interior and Security.
It is outrageous that they try to protect a former government official from his responsibility for torture, adding that torture is never legitimate for any sovereign government, and no one can allow torture, ”Sultan’s lawyer Eric Lewis told Foreign Policy.“ It is a violation of international law, and an attempt by the Egyptians. To call for a political interest and get the United States to agree to the freedom of torture ... This is against the law and against our values. "
In 2013, Sultan was shot in the arm and arrested, after Beblawi allowed security forces to suppress Morsi's supporters. Sultan was arrested at the time, among tens of thousands of politicians, as a result of the Beblawy campaign. He was released in 2015 after a call from the Obama administration.
The magazine said that despite Egypt receiving $ 1.3 billion in annual US military aid, it has become known for its repeated violations of human rights, including violent censorship of the press, adding that the recent annual US Department of State human rights report indicated that the Egyptian state often Violations are being committed, including arbitrary killings by her government and enforced disappearances.
Trump administration inaction
Foreign Policy continues to say that while Egypt's detention of American citizens has strained US-Egyptian relations recently, the Trump administration has repeatedly avoided facing Cairo over these violations. After the death of Egyptian-American citizen Mustafa Kassem in January in an Egyptian prison, the State Department considered cutting $ 300 million in military aid to Egypt, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not move to do so, as US President Donald Trump has often praised Sisi, describing him as "my favorite dictator."
But as the Corona virus continues to spread, the magazine says, members of Congress have invited Pompeo repeatedly to urge the release of American citizens imprisoned in Egypt, amid fears of deteriorating health conditions inside Egyptian prisons. One of the Egyptian human rights organizations reported that 245 detainees died in prison in 2018 due to medical negligence.
Lawyer Lewis said that he is currently talking to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to try to secure the release of the Sultan's family.
Allison MacManus - a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy in Washington - said the only understandable thing that comes from the US administration is that they love Sisi and do not want to be involved in other human rights issues other than returning American citizens.