The Washington Post strongly criticized the 15-year prison sentence imposed on Egyptian human rights activist Bahey El Din Hassan for tweeting, and said that human rights in Egypt have entered during the last six years the deepest crisis in decades.
A joint article by Elisa Massimio, Head of the Human Rights Department at Georgetown University, and Neil Hicks, Senior Director at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, considered that the six years that have passed since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi assumed the presidency in Egypt have witnessed a successive deterioration of human rights.
The article criticized the position of Western countries, and said that it is no longer surprising that many in the West stop paying attention to this, with the increasing number of activists being exiled or imprisoned, as human rights violations in Egypt have become like the story of a dog biting a man.
Dangerous stage
But last week, the two writers say, the Egyptian government crossed a dangerous new threshold in its crackdown on peaceful dissent, a threshold that everyone interested in the global struggle against tyranny should note and condemn.
Egyptian counterterrorism courts have sentenced prominent human rights activist Bahi El Din Hassan to the maximum penalty under the provisions of a brutal new cybercrime law, for his criticism of the Sisi regime, which is the longest sentence against a human rights defender in Egypt.
Elisa and Hicks explained that the behavior for which Bahi El Din was found guilty - who is widely seen as the founder of the Egyptian human rights movement and one of the country's most respected human rights defenders (currently living in exile) - is merely public comments he made on Twitter and in United Nations human rights meetings indicate the failure of the Egyptian justice system to hold state officials accountable for the widespread killings, torture, and disappearances since Sisi came to power.
A common term among autocrats
The authors added that the penal code and the new cybercrime law have been condemned by activists, rights activists and media experts as a serious obstacle to freedom of expression, as this law criminalizes "insulting state institutions such as the judiciary," and includes a clause prohibiting the publication of "false news," saying that this term has become commonplace with Autocrats around the world since US President Donald Trump emerged as a political force in the United States.
They said that Bahi El Din's comments were described as an "insult to the judiciary," and that his criticism of the regime's failure to hold anyone accountable for the brutal torture and murder of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni and his disappearance in 2016 violates the provision on "spreading false news."
They pointed out that despite his residence outside Egypt since 2014, Bahai El Din was leading international campaigns to protest against the chaos and brutality practiced by the Sisi government, and he met regularly with political leaders and senior United Nations officials, in addition to his mobilization of Egyptians inside and outside the country for the cause of justice, human rights and the rule of law. A constant inconvenience to Sisi.
Clear message
Elisa and Hicks went on to say that the criminalization of peaceful criticism of the government is indeed outrageous enough, but Bahey Eddin's appearance before the anti-terror court, and not the regular penal court, is a clear signal from the Sisi regime that it is intensifying its efforts to distort and intimidate the human rights movement as a whole through Publicly link it to terrorism.
They added that judges in the Special Terrorism Chamber are carefully selected, as those willing to judge Sisi's political opponents are chosen even in the absence of any reliable evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
In Bahi al-Din's case, the court ruled him even though the prosecution did not provide evidence to support the charges against him.
Simply put, the judge fabricated the charges to discredit Bahey al-Din and the work of his organization and other human rights activists.
Scare the Egyptians
Writers Elisa Massimio and Neil Hicks said that Sisi's strategy of discrediting his critics from local and international human rights organizations is not new, but the judgment on Bahai al-Din is an ominous escalation, and without a widespread and sustained international protest against this measure, many human rights defenders will be Human beings, journalists, and peaceful critics of the Egyptian government are vulnerable to a similar fate, and the government certainly hopes that the threat of long prison terms will make Egyptians think twice before speaking about it.
In conclusion, he said that Egypt is a large and influential country in the Arab region and outside it, and that it has its weight in the United Nations, and it participates in the biennial review of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.
There are four pillars in this strategy, one of which calls on governments to respect human rights and the rule of law in the context of combating terrorism, and Egypt's judgment of Bahai El-Din to 15 years in prison for defending these values specifically indicates that the Egyptian regime disdains this commitment and sets a dangerous example for many governments to follow.