In News & Reports

By POMED –

Egyptian media reported that parliament will soon debate a bill amending a number of security-related laws, which would further blunt the impact of the end of the state of emergency earlier this week. 

  • Unspecified amendments to Article 53 of the Anti-Terrorism Law would reportedly give the president the “necessary flexibility” to deal with potential terrorist crimes, despite the current wording already granting him sweeping powers. 
  • An amendment to the penal code, meanwhile, would toughen the punishment for disclosing “state secrets,” increasing the maximum fine from the present 500 Egyptian pounds to 50,000 ($30 to $3,000) while maintaining a prison sentence of up to five years.  
  • Another proposed amendment would reportedly change Law 136 of 2014 to make the army’s role in securing government facilities permanent. The army was given that function, normally under the purview of the police, for two years in 2014 before the arrangement was extended for another five in 2016.
  • Human Rights Watch’s Egypt researcher, Amr Magdicommented that “the government is amending the terrorism law to include more powers similar to the emergency law, which confirms that the decision to end the emergency is a sham decision and just a public relations effort directed at the West.”
  • His criticism echoes the skepticism voiced by multiple Egyptian human rights organizations that see al-Sisi’s decision to lift the state of emergency as meaningless on its own, given how several repressive laws have enshrined the emergency provisions in ordinary law.

In the latest step in the government’s public relations strategy on human rights, the Ministry of Interior released a surreal promotional video on October 28 showing off its new “American-style” prison complex.

The “Wadi El Natrun Correctional and Rehabilitation Center,” whose construction was announced by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in September, is set to replace 12 prisons when completed.

The video celebrates the prison’s “dedicated room to renew pretrial detention,” though lawyers have said the virtual hearings that will take place there “undermine legal guarantees for a fair trial and threaten the rights of defendants, particularly political prisoners.”

Formerly imprisoned photojournalist Hossam El-Sayyad highlighted the contrast between the rosy depictions of prison life in the video and the appalling conditions in which he was held.

The Ministry of Interior also released a music video about the prison complex called “Right to Life,” which the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy’s Managing Director Mai El-Sadany described as an effort by authorities to erase the memory of political prisoners’ experiences from the public awareness. She went on to call it “a kind of violence that the state is committing against former detainees and their families.”

While touring the new prison, the Ministry of Interior touted the release of an “unprecedented” number of prisoners in the past year through presidential pardons and conditional releases. Analysts pointed out, however, that the 31,000 prisoners reportedly released is in line with the yearly average and that such releases “rarely, if ever, include political prisoners.”

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https://mailchi.mp/pomed/egypt-update-new-bill-further-codifies-state-of-emergency?e=8e9e92eefa
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