Cairo-based rights organization cancels youth summer program amid state crackdown

The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies announced the cancelation of its annual summer school on human rights on Saturday amid an ongoing state crackdown on rights-based work in Egypt.

“It is currently impossible to find a safe space for young people to gather for learning or creative purposes, and prison is the fate of anyone interested in public affairs,” the leading human rights organization said in a statement.

The institute’s summer school has provided opportunities for over 1200 Egyptian university students to annually gather and discuss issues related to human rights, citizenship and violence since 1994. It has attracted hundreds of young Egyptians that have later become leading human rights advocates, journalists, researchers, judges, university professors and artists.

A source from CIHRS, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Mada Masr on Saturday that the current political climate has made it very hard to organize the summer school this year, given the questions around the legality of the institute.

The Cairo-based rights organization has been implicated in a case against human rights organizations concerning foreign funding, in which a final verdict concerning the freezing of the organization’s assets is due on August 15.

The source added that holding the summer school presents a serious risk to its organizers and participants.

“When we headed to the place where we hold the summer school every year, we were asked to provide more paperwork, including a list of all the names of the school’s participants. We were told that this was at the request of security. We already have six employees interrogated in the foreign funding case, we cannot take the risk of jeopardizing the safety of our staff, let alone the safety of the participants,” the source explained.

“When conditions were really difficult, we used to hold the summer school at our premises. Now it is too difficult even to hold it there. It seems the state does not want to see any discussion around human rights or citizenship,” he added.

Mada Masr spoke to a number of CIHRS’ summer school graduates, who all said the program had strongly impacted their lives. Fine arts student Sohair Atef participated in the 2012 school. “I was a fresh high school graduate back then, and I cannot describe how much this school impacted me, I was a new person when I graduated,” she said.

Atef explained that the school taught her how to accept difference, and how to respect people regardless of their religion, color or affiliations.

Although Atef says she doesn’t want to work in human rights directly, she sees the utility of all she learned from the school in her daily life. “It was a utopic experience for me. When I graduated, I wanted to implement what I learned in the real world, but it was difficult because there was no tolerance or acceptance for the other, which angered me in the beginning.”