By MadaMasr –
In light of Egypt’s human rights violations, the European Union Parliament passed a resolution on Friday urging member states to reconsider EU–Egypt relations and implement more stringent monitoring and accountability mechanisms.
In Egypt, those working in the human rights field welcomed the non-binding resolution, saying that decision makers in Egypt must seriously heed the recommendations by opening up the public sphere and releasing political prisoners. However, state officials impugned the EU Parliament move, saying it infringes on Egypt’s sovereignty and was put forth by “satanic forces” working against Egypt.
The resolution passed on Friday with a 434-vote majority of 685 members and includes 18 recommendations, the most important of which are establishing a long-term international mechanism to monitor the human rights situation in Egypt, imposing sanctions on the Egyptian government, prosecuting officials who are implicated in human rights violations, and the immediate release of political prisoners.
Painting a picture of the rights situation in Egypt that “has continued to deteriorate,” the EU Parliament asserted that Egyptian authorities have continued to intensify a crackdown “on civil society, human rights defenders, health workers, journalists, opposition members, academics and lawyers, and continue to brutally and systematically repress any form of dissent, thereby undermining core freedoms, notably the freedoms of expression, both online and offline, and of association and assembly, political pluralism, the right to participation in public affairs and the rule of law.”
The European Parliament recommendations included a call for the immediate release of 25 political prisoners, including Mohamed Ibrahim, Mohamed Ramadan, Abdelrahman Tarek, Ezzat Ghoneim, Haytham Mohamadeen, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy, Mahienour El-Massry, Mohamed El-Baqer, Hoda Abdelmoniem, Ahmed Amasha, Islam El-Kalhy, Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh, Esraa Abd El Fattah, Ramy Kamel, Ibrahim Ezz El-Din, Zyad el-Elaimy, Hassan Barbary, Ramy Shaath, Sanaa Seif, Solafa Magdy, Hossam al-Sayyad, Mahmoud Hussein and Kamal El-Balshy.
The resolution also pointed to a number of specific violations as cause for concern.
Atop this list was the arrest of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights staff members Gasser Abdel Razek, Karim Ennarah and Mohammad Basheer in November following their meeting with European ambassadors and the subsequent ruling by a terrorism court to uphold a decision to freeze their assets pending investigations.
The continued remand detention of University of Bologna student Patrick George Zaki, who was arbitrarily arrested at Cairo International Airport in February and subjected to torture, was also underlined as a gross rights violation.
The resolution also criticizes the Egyptian state’s handling of the investigation into the 2016 murder of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni. Despite the Italian prosecution’s “unequivocal proof of the involvement of four Egyptian state security officers,” Egyptian authorities have constantly hindered progress in the investigation, the resolution states.
An EU Parliament source who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity called the measures put forth on Friday “the harshest so far.” The EU’s restrictive measures – which were formally adopted on December 7 – would target those involved in crimes ranging from genocide and torture to arbitrary arrests or detentions.
The resolution was drafted to work alongside new EU provisions, such as the Magnitsky Act, the source says. In November, the EU Parliament voted to grant the EU powers to freeze assets and impose travel bans on individuals involved in human rights abuses, after the bloc’s member states provisionally approved the European Magnitsky Act.
The US Magnitsky Act was signed by former President Barack Obama in December 2012 with the aim of targeting Russian officials deemed responsible for the death of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Since then, the law has been used to sanction individuals accused of human rights abuses worldwide.
Mohamed Zaree, the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, agrees with the EU Parliament source’s assessment that this is the harshest criticism Egypt has faced yet.
“The European Parliament has never explicitly criticized the Egyptian regime in that way,” says Zaree, adding that this is the first time that specific sanctions against the Egyptian regime have been put on the table, a move that could garner widespread international support.
For another figure working in Egypt’s human rights field who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, the resolution from the EU Parliament is a warning sign of the deteriorating human rights condition in Egypt, which is reaching a dead end, and an invitation to find a political solution to the current impasse.
“The way the EU Parliament is addressing Egypt is the same way it used to address Tunisia during the rule of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Burma, or Iran in the past few years,”the source says, adding that the European Parliament’s resolution proves that the harsh security policy pursued by the Egyptian regime has failed on all political and civil levels.
The Egyptian government could absorb global frustration with its policies by taking simple measures that would not come at a high cost, such as releasing the thousands of prisoners who face trumped up charges, ending the abusive use of remand detention, and halting the practice of rotating prisoners between different cases so as to keep them imprisoned for the longest time possible, the source argues.
However, those closer to the state did not appear to accept the criticism of Egypt’s rights record, instead opting for much of the same rhetoric that has been deployed in recent years to deflect concerns.
The most significant pushback against the EU Parliament resolution has come from the recently elected Senate and the members of the House of Representatives.
The first statement came from House of Representative Speaker Ali Abdel Aal on Friday, who said that the recommendations “present many fallacies that do not correspond to the Egyptian reality,” and urged the European Parliament “not to appoint itself as a guardian of Egypt nor politicize Egypt’s human rights issues for its political and electoral interests.” The parliamentary speaker, whose term expired five days ago, added that the European Parliament should have instead focused on Egypt’s efforts in combatting terrorism and illegal migration and improving the lives of Egyptian citizens.
In a similar vein, a statement issued on Saturday morning asserted that the EU is using the human rights file to intervene in Egyptian affairs, stressing that the recommendations were put forth by “satanic forces that are working against Egypt.”
“The EU Parliament has deliberately neglected Egypt’s efforts over the years on the human rights file,” the Senate statement read, adding that Egypt “will not accept the utilization of civil society organizations as a cover for committing crimes against the state with impunity.”
Senate Speaker Abdel Wahab Abdel Razek also released a statement on Saturday, in which he said that all the prisoners that the European Parliament has urged Egypt to release are accused of committing felonies that are punishable by Egyptian law, and that the defendants are being tried by the same legal procedures that apply to others.
