EGYPT: Pillars of freedom brought doen crashin in the muck.

Worse than the dictators: Egypt’s leaders bring pillars of freedom crashing down

Adly Mansour and now Abdel Fatah al-Sisi are ruling by decrees, banning protest and severely curbing freedom of speech

A Cairo university student holds a flare during a protest against the acquittal of former president Hosni Mubarak over hundreds of deaths during the 2011 uprising. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Egypt is enacting authoritarian laws at a rate unmatched by any regime for 60 years, legal specialists from four institutions have told the Guardian.

Since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Morsi’s successors in the presidency, Adly Mansour and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, have used the absence of an elected parliament to almost unilaterally issue a series of draconian decrees that severely restrict freedom of expression, association and assembly.

The speed at which the decrees have been issued outpaces legislative frenzies under the dictators Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, and is matched only by the period that followed the toppling of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, according to Amr Shalakany, associate law professor at the American University in Cairo; Amr Abdulrahman, director of civil liberties at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights; Mohamed Elhelw, head of legal research at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms; and Ahmed Ezzat, a human rights lawyer, and previously a legal researcher at another prominent rights group.

“This is not normal,” said Shalakany. “Historically, it’s completely out of pattern with any normal legislation that we’ve had experience of in this country.” The only precedent, Shalakany said, was set by the Revolutionary Command Council of the early 1950s. “The rate is faster than even the last year of Sadat’s [tenure, 1981]; the scope is also wider.”

President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi reviews a guard of honour after being sworn in as president of Egypt in June. Photograph: Reuters

Legislation enacted by Mansour, an interim president installed by Sisi after Morsi’s removal, and Sisi himself, a former army chief elected to succeed Mansour, include laws that ban protest, expand the jurisdiction of military courts, remove several limits on pre-trial detention, and restrict media coverage of the armed forces without prior approval.

Most troublingly, the moves have been made without the involvement of parliament, and with only the nominal oversight of a cabinet and a committee over which Sisi has overbearing influence.

“Sadat and Mubarak did not use their capacity to issue controversial legislation in the absence of parliament to nearly the same extent as Sisi is doing now,” said Abdulrahman. “These are crucial decrees that relate to different spheres of economic and social life that passed without any kind of national dialogue.”

According to a roadmap drawn up after the overthrow of Morsi, who was himself accused of draconian measures, a parliament should have been elected by the end of 2013. Revisions to the roadmap then pushed back elections until July 2014. But despite the speed at which other laws have been passed, a second law needed to set elections in motion still has not been finalised, meaning Egypt may not have an elected legislature until summer 2015.

Sisi and Mansour have filled the vacuum with controversial decisions well beyond their constitutional remit. “The constitution gives the president the right to issue decrees in exceptional situations, out of necessity,” said Elhelw. “But the laws they have issued are not absolutely necessary. If they weren’t issued, the state would not stop.”

The surge of authoritarian legislation includes, in chronological order:

Supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi clash with security forces near Cairo University earlier this year. Photograph: APA Images/Rex

 

 

Tender law, September 2013

A Mansour decree let government ministers award contracts to companies without a public tender process. In the months after the decree, the army was awarded building contracts worth about $1bn.

Extension of pre-trial detention, September 2013

The pre-trial detention limit for those accused of crimes punishable by life sentences was removed, technically allowing for certain unconvicted political dissidents to remain on remand in perpetuity.

Protest ban November 2013

The protest ban has become one of the state’s main new tools of oppression, used to arrest thousands of people.

Investment law, April 2014

This bans third parties from appealing against the awarding of government contracts. “It’s very dangerous,” said Ahmed Ezzat. “If you as a citizen see the contract contains corruption, you can’t appeal. And that is itself the definition of corruption.”

Elections law, June 2014

Experts warn a new voting system will privilege the old elites, and inhibit liberal parties that emerged after the revolution. “The electoral law is tailored to ensure the new parliament is exclusively for wealthy, Muslim men,” said Abdulrahman.

University law, June 2014

Sisi gave himself the power to hire and fire university heads, allowing him Mubarak-style control of campuses, the fulcrum of dissent since Morsi’s overthrow.

Clampdown on foreign funding, September 2014

Requesting or receiving foreign funds for the purposes of “harming the national interest” is punishable by life in prison. The government says this is aimed at terrorists. Rights groups, whose funding is mostly sourced overseas, say the vagueness of the wording can be used against them, and have scaled back requests for help from abroad.

Expansion of military jurisdiction, October 2014

The army was given jurisdiction over large parts of public space, including roads, bridges and universities. The move was nominally aimed at terrorists but also makes it easier for the government to try members of the political opposition in the country’s opaque military courts.

Ultimatum to rights groups, November 2014

Rights groups were given an deadline to sign up to restrictive Mubarak-era legislation, or face being shut down. The backlash has yet to begin – but several groups were frightened enough to scale back their activity, or freeze it altogether.

Terrorism law, drafted December 2014

If rubber-stamped by Sisi, this law would expand the definition of terrorism to anything that “harms national unity”– loose phrasing that could be applied to the opposition. “It’s the most horrible new law in my opinion,” said Abdulrahman. “It’s very vague, and relates to almost anything. It’s almost unprecedented.”

FREEDOM

EGYPT/JAPAN: Egyptians, are you any less?

Members of SEALDs, a group of young people against government legislation allowing the Self-Defense Forces a greater role internationally, march in Tokyo's fashionable Omotesando district on Sunday. SEALDs stand for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy. | KYODO

Young Japanese stage nationwide protests against security bills being debated in Upper House

Thousands of young people rallied Sunday throughout Japan, protesting the security bills that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to pass during the current Diet session.

Demonstrations and gatherings took place at more than 60 locations around Japan — in Hokkaido, Aichi, Osaka, Fukuoka and other prefectures — in response to a call by a group called Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, or SEALDs.

The bills are now under deliberation at the Upper House, after being railroaded through the Lower House by the ruling coalition, sparking public opposition. The bills would significantly expand the scope of Self-Defense Forces missions overseas.

In Tokyo, about 6,500 protesters gathered to march toward the popular Shibuya shopping and entertainment district, chanting slogans such as “No War” and “No Change in the Law.”

[read more here]

 

 

To every Egyptian who has a speck of dignity 

and an ounce of pride; Egyptians whose boys are being tortured

and girls raped in prisons and detentions, 

Al-Mutanabbi, the famous poet, said about you in similar circumstances,

"Do you think the peack of knowledge is the trimming of your mustaches

O nation, at whose ignorance all other nations laughed"

Al-Mutanabbi also said,

"Do not buy a slave unless along with him you have bout a stick

slaves are verily filthy miserables"

Let me ask you, are you any less than those Japanese?

Is your history any less glorious?

Is there any brave men left among you?

Have you become slaves?

Have you totally scummed to the criminal ruling junta?

WA-WATANAH!, WA-ISLAMAH!, WA-KIRAMATAH!, WA-IRADHAH!

 Wake up from your slumber!

"There is a door for the red revolution

That is knocked only by the hand stained with blood" 

 

  
Abul-Kassim El-Shabbi

EGYPT: Egypt between the Hammer and the Anvil...

Cairo citizens caught between Isis violence and Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s draconian security crackdown with journalists and activists jailed and a new terrorism law in effect, a culture of fear is growing in Egypt

Egyptian riot police stand in front of a damaged national security building following a bomb blast in northern Cairo’s district of Shubra. Photograph: Ahmed Abd El Fattah/ ahmed abd el fattah/Demotix/Corbis

Jared Malsin in Cairo

Sunday 23 August 2015 00.05 BST

The blast shook buildings for miles around. Sleeping residents awoke, called each other, then stared at glowing screens, seeking an explanation for the explosion and the sirens wailing in the distance.

Egyptian activist, writer, and engineer Wael Eskandar. 

Last Thursday a massive car bomb had detonated outside a security building in Shubra Al-Khaima, a working-class district on Cairo’s northern edge. Chunks of concrete had been blasted off the building, shards of glass were sprinkled across the pavement. The windows of the neighbouring apartment building had been blown out, the private spaces of the families within flung open to the street.

Such incidents have become almost routine in Cairo. The Egyptian state is locked in battle with an accelerating insurgency. In June, Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, was assassinated in a bombing in an elite Cairo neighbourhood. Days later, insurgents staged a brazen attack on the military’s positions in north Sinai. Last week, Islamic State militants claimed to have beheaded a Croatian man who was abducted from a desert highway outside Cairo.

In response, the government drafted a draconian counter-terrorism law that establishes special courts and imposes fines on journalists who stray from the government’s account of an attack. Critics say the law grants sweeping powers to the president and could lead to an expansion of the government’s two-year-old campaign against political opponents.

Ordinary Egyptians find themselves wedged between the violence of the insurgents and a security state that wields unprecedented power.

“I refer to it as the terror law because it’s not really anti-terror. It’s legitimising state terror,” said Wael Eskandar, an Egyptian journalist. “It’s a replacement for the emergency law, trumping the constitution and trumping people’s right to freedom of expression, and granting legalised impunity to police forces who are already very brutal.”

Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, signed the new measure into law last Sunday. Sisi is the former military commander who led the forced removal of the elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. Egypt currently has no parliament, and as a result legislative power rests in Sisi’s hands.

The legislation comes in the context of the two-year clampdown. Since Morsi’s removal, the state has accelerated the use of lethal force to suppress demonstrations, killing some 1,000 people in a single day in August 2013. In the crackdown, more than 40,000 people have been arrested, according to the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights.

Eskandar identifies with a generation of Egyptians who participated in the 2011 uprising that ended three decades of dictatorship under President Hosni Mubarak. It ejected Mubarak and his coterie from power and dismantled his political apparatus.

Millions of Egyptians hoped the revolution would go beyond merely a change of personnel to end the practices of authoritarian rule that characterised Mubarak’s regime: torture, corruption, electoral fraud. But since the 2013 military take- over, many of those same practices have returned and increased. Beyond the raw data of the political clampdown, activists say fear has crept back into Egyptian political life, a result of the re-emergence of a Mubarak-era security state.

“There was this culture of fear of criticising the government even under Mubarak, but now it feels even more real, where you know they might act upon it,” said Eskandar. “It feels like I’m under threat all the time. People I know are being threatened, being assaulted.”

The fear is a result of the possible consequences of running foul of the security services. Egyptian human rights defenders and activists have been jailed after farcical trials. Others have been banned from travelling. Still others face murkier fates. Esraa El-Taweel, a 23-year-old photojournalist, and two friends were reportedly arrested walking along the Nile cornice in Cairo’s Maadi neighbourhood on 1 June. For at least two weeks the authorities denied the three were in custody. Two weeks later Taweel was reportedly spotted in a prison.

Jailed Egyptian photographer and activist Esraa el-Taweel

Taweel is just one of dozens of people who have been “disappeared” recently by Egypt’s security forces, according to human rights groups. In early June a group called Freedom for the Brave identified 163 people who went missing over two months. The list included 64 people who were eventually located after spending more than 24 hours in undisclosed detention, 66 who were still missing, and other cases that were unverified.

In the new reality of a violent struggle between state and insurgents, journalists also face harassment and worse at the hands of the authorities. Reporting on the militants’ attacks has become a risky prospect, not least because of police who have come to regard people with cameras as suspect. After a bombing that destroyed part of the Italian consulate in Cairo in July, police held four journalists for arriving on the scene “too fast”.

In reporters’ encounters with police, the stakes are high. At least 18 journalists are in Egypt’s prisons, according to a tally released in June by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. On 29 August, a verdict is expected in a retrial of three journalists – Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste – who spent more than 400 days in prison over their work with Al Jazeera English. Another, photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known by the nickname Shawkan,has now been in prison for more than two years after attempting to document the August 2013 massacre in Cairo’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square.

“Their entire quest for power is built on a lie and they want to maintain that lie, so it’s really important for them that they’re not challenged,” said Eskandar. “So, for example, for international recognition they need to counter journalists who are reporting out of Egypt.”

EGYPT: Egypt's attacks on press freedom unprecedented, says watchdog

Mahmoud Abou-Zeid, an Egyptian photojournalist known by his nickname Shawkan, appears before a judge in May for the first time after spending more than 600 days in prison in Cairo. Photograph: Lobna Tarek/AP

Journalists face unprecedented threats in Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi’s Egypt, a watchdog has said, with the highest number behind bars in the country since it began keeping records in 1990.

In a report detailing the incarceration of 18 Egyptians, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said on Thursday that most were accused of affiliation with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood of the ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

It said the threat of imprisonment in Egypt is part of a stifling atmosphere in which authorities pressure media outlets to censor critical voices and issue gag orders on sensitive topics. It said the president, Sisi, had invoked national security to trample on liberties.

“CPJ spoke to high-level officials, including the prosecutor general and the minister of transitional justice, who denied that Egypt was holding any journalists in jail in relation to their work,” the group said in the report, which was based on a census, taken on 1 June, of Egyptian prisons. “But CPJ research shows that the government of al-Sisi … has used the pretext of national security to crack down on human rights, including press freedom.”

As army chief, Sisi overthrew Morsi in 2013 during protests against his rule, before winning a landslide election last year. Since the overthrow, authorities have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and other opponents, killing hundreds, jailing thousands and sparking a backlash of attacks against security forces, mostly in the restive Sinai peninsula. Activists say dozens more journalists have been detained.

Ahmed Mansour, an al-Jazeera journalist, speaks to the press on Monday after leaving jail in Berlin, where he was detained on an Egyptian warrant. Photograph: Michael Sohn/AP

Cases detailed in the report show that most were jailed for covering protests, airing views contrary to the government or reporting on injustices committed against people affiliated with the Brotherhood, which Egypt considers a terrorist organisation. Several stand accused of “spreading chaos”, while others are charged with disseminating “false news” or anti-government messages.

In one case highlighted in the report, Mahmoud Abou-Zeid was arrested in August 2013 while taking photographs of the violent dispersal of a pro-Morsi sitin, in which hundreds of Islamists were killed. He has been in pre-trial detention since then and has not been formally charged.

“I spoke with him last week and he was tired and depressed,” said his brother, Mohamed. “We don’t know what will happen next and have no information regarding the future of the case. It is a very difficult situation for all of us.”

In another case, a photographer, Omar Abdel-Maksoud, was arrested in 2014 while covering a baby shower for a woman who had been detained and forced to give birth in a hospital in handcuffs. Police launched a violent raid on the gathering, the report said, citing local media.

CPJ cited cases of journalists disappearing into Egypt’s labyrinth of detention facilities without lawyers or family members knowing where they were, with court hearings sometimes taking place without their knowledge.

It said the heavy restrictions meant that scarce information emerged from entire regions, especially Sinai, where militant groups are fighting security forces and little was known about the conflict’s toll on civilians. One journalist from the area, Saeed Abuhaj, was arrested for carrying a leaflet bearing Brotherhood slogans, his lawyer said. He has been charged with inciting violence and using weapons against police.

Several high-profile cases involving the state’s campaign against journalists have attracted international attention, most recently that of Ahmed Mansour, a journalist for the Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera, who was stopped in Germany when officers there acted on an Egyptian arrest warrant. After detaining him last weekend, German prosecutors decided on Monday to free him and not pursue his extradition to Egypt, where he was convicted in 2011 on torture charges he denies. CPJ and France’s Reporters Without Borders criticised the detention.

Al-Jazeera has been a particular focus for Egypt following Morsi’s overthrow, since the current government sees it as a mouthpiece for the Brotherhood. Three journalists from its English-language channel are being retried on charges of being part of a terrorist group and airing falsified footage. One of the three, Australian journalist Peter Greste, has been deported.

An Egyptian journalist at a protest in Cairo last year calling for the release of Mahmoud Abou-Zeid (Shawkan). Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP

In the US, the administration of Barack Obama has criticised Egypt’s restrictions on free speech and the arrests of political dissidents, citing a “steadily shrinking space for political dissent”. But Washington has continued to provide Cairo with $1.3bn (£830m) in annual military aid after briefly suspending it following Morsi’s ousting.

Egypt’s first freely elected president, Morsi was recently sentenced to death in connection with a mass prison break during the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

An Egyptian journalist not cited in the report said he and others, especially videographers and photographers, are regularly targeted when they cover Brotherhood-affiliated protests. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

“They raided my family’s apartment looking for me six times since 2013, and this month they smashed up a lot of furniture,” he said, adding that he has been staying with friends. “My work is a blessing and a curse – I’m living on the run.”