Local civil society group blasts criticisms of NGO case, insists on Egyptian sovereignty

The Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs (ECFA) — a Cairo-based civil society organization — issued a statement Sunday lambasting the Working Group on Egypt’s recent letter to US President Barack Obama, which urged him to “publicly and privately” condemn Egypt’s “accelerating crackdown on human rights and civil society.”

The Working Group on Egypt is a US-based, nonpartisan initiative that focuses on Egyptian politics and political reform, and includes experts from the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Freedom House and Human Rights Watch.

“You must make crystal clear to the Egyptian president that continued assaults on civil society, including harassment of US organizations, will make it difficult for the administration to cooperate across a range of issues, including your administration’s efforts to promote American investment in Egypt and to provide financial assistance to the Egyptian government and military,” said the letter, issued March 23.

“Who mandated the Working Group on Egypt to examine the human rights situation in Egypt?” the ECFA countered in its statement. “It is stating the obvious that sovereign nations have the right to regulate foreign political activities and foreign funding of those activities within their borders.”

A judicial process is the only way to determine the fate of the civil society organizations referenced by the Working Group on Egypt, the ECFA maintained.

“Egyptians will not allow any country or group of individuals, including the United States, to pressure Egypt’s judiciary to terminate or reshape the outcomes of ongoing investigations,” the statement argued.

On April 20, the Cairo Criminal Court is scheduled to review a ruling to freeze the assets of human rights defenders Hossam Bahgat and Gamal Eid, pending investigations into charges that they illegally received US$1.5 million in foreign funding for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Arab Network for Human Rights Information. Eid and Bahgat were also banned from travel in February.

Other people and entities implicated in the case include the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), Nazra for Feminist Studies, Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and human rights lawyer Negad al-Borai, head of the United Group.

In its letter, the Working Group on Egypt condemned the prosecution of these organizations, the recent murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni, the detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners, and the forced disappearance, torture and extrajudicial killings of hundreds of others.

“If this crackdown is allowed to reach its conclusion, it will silence an indigenous human rights community that has survived more than 30 years of authoritarian rule, leaving few if any Egyptians free to investigate mounting abuses by the state,” the group said.

Closely echoing the language of a Foreign Ministry statement issued last Thursday, the ECFA statement claimed that there are 47,000 civil society organizations in Egypt, “the greatest majority of which abide by the Egyptian applicable laws. A small minority of them fails to communicate to the competent Egyptian authorities the foreign funding they received, and which domestic social activities they finance or plan to do so, in accordance with Egyptian applicable laws.”

The ECFA then lauded Egypt’s path to democracy, including “adopting the most progressive Constitution in the Middle East,” the election of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the newly seated Parliament.

“The political democratic trajectory of Egypt in the context of the ongoing regional upheaval must be praised and supported in order to advance a more stable regional order,” it said.

The ECFA called on the Working Group on Egypt to “immediately discontinue all its covert and overt efforts of interference in the Egyptian judicial system, as it seeks to advance a set of narrow, self-centered interests and extra-national objectives, advocating political unlawful measures against ongoing Egyptian judicial investigations.”