Govt report on post-June 30 violence won’t be released to public

The fact-finding committee tasked with investigating post-June 30 violence is not entitled to release its findings to the public, said committee spokesperson Amr Marwan, the state-owned Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported on Monday.

The committee may only send the final report to the president, but could then submit a request for the president to then make the report public, Marwan added.

Minister of Transitional Justice Mohamed Amin al-Mahdi requested in December that a committee be formed to investigate all violent incidents that occurred after the June 30 mass protests that ultimately led to former President Mohamed Morsi's ouster.

These incidents include the deadly clashes in front of the Republican Guards headquarters, the fatal violence that occurred during the mid-August dispersals of the pro-Morsi Al-Manassa, Rabea al-Adaweya and Nahda Square protest camps, the burning of churches, violence inside universities, assassinations, assassination attempts, attempts to block Suez Canal and violence in Sinai.

In a meeting with representatives from human rights organizations on Monday, committee head Fouad Abdel Moneim Riyad said that the body still needed a great deal of time before finalizing the report, adding that all state institutions were obliged by presidential decree to provide all information requested by the committee’s investigators, reported the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram.

Moneim Riyad urged human rights organizations not to blame the committee for being unable to release its findings to the media.

"The committee is created [with limited ability to act], and we are all men of law as we do not belong to a person or a political affiliation. We do not have the political will to do so. Please do not blame us for what we do not have, but for what we have," he said, as quoted in MENA.

The meeting’s attendees responded by stressing the need for transparency within the committee's work, adding that making the findings public was of equal importance, according to Al-Ahram.

The National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) had prepared reports on the same incidents of violence investigated by the fact-finding committee and would release them soon, NCHR member George Ishaq said in the meeting.

Mohamed Zarie, a representative of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), slammed the lack of transparency that has been de rigeur for the state’s fact-finding committees, emphasizing that the current committee should not commit the same mistake.

Others worried that the committee could be biased.

There are “legitimate doubts” regarding the neutrality of the committee, warned Ahmed Ragheb, a lawyer and member of the National Association for Human Rights. He pointed out that the head of the committee had previously called the Muslim Brotherhood group a terrorist organization, which Ragheb asserted tarnished the committee’s credibility, as its members should not be biased against those involved in the acts of violence being investigated.

Ragheb also slammed allegations of ongoing human rights violations committed against detained activists and political prisoners. Forming a fact-finding committee while the state itself is involved in these types of abuses could simply be a move to “absorb the anger of the public,” he claimed.

But Marwan reteirated the committee's objectivity, asserting that its mandate ensured its professionalism and independent conduct.

Marwan said in late January that members of Islamist movements should come forward with their accounts of the violent events that followed Morsi’s removal from office.

Any such testimonies would remain confidential, Marwan said, assuring that all possible safety precautions would be taken to protect those who would come forward.

Marwan highlighted his work with two similar fact-finding committees formed by the former Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as well as by Morsi’s government, stressing that the identity of those who had presented testimonies to those committees had never been revealed.

Separately, CIHRS said in a statement that human rights organizations are increasingly worried about what it described as an "undeclared state of emergency,” citing the collapse of the rule of law and the supremacy of the police over the prosecution and the judiciary as signs of deteriorating conditions for human rights in Egypt.

The statement came amid a meeting by rights activists with UN representatives.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Amr Marwan was the presidential spokesperson. It has been updated to reflect that he is the June 30 fact-finding committee spokesperson.