By Uzay Bulut –
Trade preferences, migration cooperation, and security assistance should be conditioned on measurable progress in the human rights area, Coptic Solidarity’s Lindsay Rodriguez says.
Today, Egypt is a majority-Muslim, Arabic-speaking country. Yet, before its violent conquest by Islam in the seventh century, it was a majority-Christian nation that was mostly inhabited by its indigenous people, the Copts.
Coptic Christians are deeply rooted in ancient Egyptian traditions through language, liturgical music, and ritual symbolism. They have preserved a cultural identity that long predates the Islamic conquest of Egypt.
Copts were some of the earliest followers of Christianity due to St. Mark bringing the Gospel to Egypt. Since then, Egypt has been home to many of the greatest Christian theologians, including Athanasius, Anthony (of the desert), and Cyril the Great.
As descendants of the ancient Egyptians, Copts have lived in their homeland for several millennia. They have survived persecution since the first Arab Muslim invasion in the seventh century as well as the subsequent invasion of the Ottoman Turks.
There are currently around 15,000,000 Copts in Egypt, making them both the largest Christian and the largest non-Muslim community in the Middle East and North Africa.
Egypt’s Copts are today amongst the most severely persecuted communities in the world. They live as second-class citizens in their ancestral homeland, marginalized both institutionally and socially.
They face abduction, forced disappearance, unlawful arrests, torture, rape, pressure to convert to Islam, mob attacks, and discrimination. But as Caroline Doss, president of the organization Coptic Solidarity, notes, in the face of these human rights violations, “the response of the Egyptian government is often slow, weak, or completely absent.” Violence against Coptic Christians is rarely punished. This increases their exposure to repeated attacks and extends impunity to their attackers.
Hundreds of Coptic Christian women and minor girls have been lured, abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, abused, and forcibly married. Egyptian authorities have consistently failed both to prevent these crimes and to prosecute the perpetrators.
For instance, Coptic Solidarity reports that Demiana Ghali Gaber Ghali, a 24-year-old Coptic woman, was forcibly taken on September 9 and that the Egyptian National Security, part of the Ministry of Interior, is complicit in her disappearance. It was later revealed that the following day, all of her official identity documents were altered to identify her as Muslim.
Egyptian security forces arrested 70 Copts from Ghali’s extended family on 17 September after they protested the abduction of their daughter. Sixty of them were later released without their mobile phones—which have not yet been returned. Investigations and detentions continue with the remaining ten.
Another recent case is that of Silvana Atef Fanous, a mentally handicapped 17-year-old Copt who was abducted by Saher Mohamed Ragab, a Muslim man whose father is a police officer. When her family reported her disappearance to the police, they were told that Silvana chose to convert to Islam in order to marry Saher, whom she never knew before her disappearance. Silvana is diagnosed with a disability that has left her thinking and behaving like an 8-year-old. Regardless of her mental condition and minor age, the police collaborated with her abductor, according to her family.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government continues to disproportionately arrest Coptic Christians on blasphemy charges. Dr. Augustinos Samaan, 37, is a Coptic researcher who was arrested on October 1, 2025, for “derision of Islam” under Egypt’s “contempt of religion” laws. Samaan holds a Ph.D. in comparative religion and is engaged in Christian apologetics. Through scholarly work and online educational content, he peacefully discussed religious issues and responded to anti-Christian sentiment. These are all activities protected under international human rights law. Yet, Samaan has been jailed, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment with hard labor, and assaulted by fellow detainees.
On October 22, Bola Adel Naguib Attia, an 18-year-old Coptic Christian student, was arrested and, according to a Coptic Solidarity report, subjected to severe violations of his legal and constitutional rights. On that date, a security force consisting of Counter-Terrorism Police and several officers from the National Security Agency raided his family’s home. Their apartment was searched, a number of mobile phones were seized, and Bola was arrested amid a state of panic and fear among his family.
After disappearing for over ten days, Bola appeared before the Supreme State Security Prosecution on November 2, facing charges including joining an illegal organization, disturbing public peace, misusing social media, and contempt of religion. He told the prosecution that he had been tortured during the first three days of detention, and it was visibly obvious that he was suffering “extreme exhaustion and visible fear,” but his statements were not recorded. The report adds:
Bola is suffering from harsh and inhumane detention conditions in prison, without regard to the fact that he is a secondary-school student—a situation that endangers both his educational future and his psychological well-being. … We affirm that what Bola is being subjected to constitutes a serious violation of the legal and constitutional guarantees afforded to every Egyptian citizen, as well as of the provisions of international conventions to which Egypt is a signatory.”
On September 30, a bipartisan resolution (House Resolution 776) was submitted to the U.S. Congress. It is co-sponsored by Representative J. French Hill (R) and Representative Tom Suozzi (D). The resolution urges the Egyptian government to promote religious tolerance and end discrimination against Egypt’s Coptic Christian community.
In the face of this relentless persecution, Coptic Solidarity, an international non-profit organization, seeks to advocate for equal citizenship rights for Egypt’s Coptic Christian community. The organization’s director of development and advocacy, Lindsay Rodriguez, answered these questions from europeanconservative.com:
QUESTION
Copts have been arrested in Egypt for exercising freedom of speech, including criticizing or comparing religions. Is there a recent increase in harassment and persecution of Copts, and what are the reasons behind it?
Yes. What we are witnessing is not an isolated uptick, but a continuation—and in some respects an intensification—of a long-standing pattern of repression against Copts who peacefully exercise freedom of expression, belief, or scholarly inquiry—keeping in mind that in the vast majority of cases, these are individuals who are merely responding to nonstop, virulent attacks on Christianity. Such attacks that involve violent hate speech are conducted under the watchful and approving eyes of the authorities and are rarely penalized.
The recent sentencing of Dr. Augustinos Samaan, a comparative religion researcher, is illustrative. He was sentenced in January 2026 to five years’ imprisonment with hard labor following a secretive trial held without notice to his lawyers or family. His work consisted of academic discussion and online educational content responding to anti-Christian incitement—activity protected under both Egypt’s constitution and international law. Instead, Egypt’s “contempt of religion” statute (Article 98(f) of the Penal Code) was deployed to criminalize peaceful expression, a law that in practice functions almost exclusively to shield Islam from critique but is not applied equally to other beliefs.
The underlying issue is structural: Egypt does not approach freedom of belief as an individual right but as a managed privilege. Religious identity is regulated by the state, and deviation from the dominant religious narrative—particularly by Christians or converts—is framed as destabilizing.
Egyptian law and practice continue to reflect a hierarchy in which Muslims are the default citizens, while Christians are tolerated as religious categories rather than equal rights-holders. Since 2013, the National Security Sector has played an increasingly dominant role in cases involving speech, belief, and online activity. Despite repeated documentation by NGOs and UN-accredited bodies, consequences for Egypt’s misuse of blasphemy laws have been minimal, encouraging further abuse.
The result is a chilling effect on Coptic intellectual, religious, and civic life—one that is incompatible with any meaningful conception of freedom of expression or belief.
QUESTION
Several Coptic girls and women have been abducted in recent months. Why are Copts targeted in this way, and what are the objectives behind these crimes?
The targeting of Coptic women and girls is systematic, not random, and has been extensively documented by Coptic Solidarity over more than a decade. These cases constitute luring, abduction, trafficking, forced conversion, and forced marriage, often occurring with the complicity—or deliberate inaction—of local authorities.
Our reports, including “Hidden Crimes, Public Deception” and “Jihad of the Womb.” document hundreds of cases involving patterns such as grooming via social media, luring through trusted intermediaries, kidnapping, sexual coercion, and subsequent forced religious conversion.
Coptic women are targeted for several intersecting reasons.
In Egypt, leaving Islam is treated as a security issue, while converting to Islam is facilitated and rewarded. This asymmetry makes Coptic women uniquely vulnerable. Women from religious minorities face compounded vulnerability due to weak legal protections, patriarchal norms, and social stigma.
Perpetrators openly frame these acts as religiously justified. As documented by former traffickers and victims’ families, certain Salafist networks describe these crimes as a form of demographic or religious warfare—what has been termed “Jihad of the Womb.” Families routinely report being refused police reports, threatened into silence, or told their daughters “converted willingly,” even when evidence of coercion exists.
The objective is not merely individual abuse. These crimes function to terrorize the broader Coptic community, weaken communal bonds, and reinforce the message that Copts—especially women—do not enjoy equal protection under the law.
QUESTION
What can the U.S. administration and the EU executive do to help Copts in Egypt?
Western governments possess significant leverage but have consistently underused it. Meaningful action would require moving beyond rhetorical concern toward measurable accountability.
At a minimum, the U.S. and EU should recognize the facts. The U.S., and particularly the EU, quite visibly keep such issues, for a variety of reasons, at arm’s length and almost never address them. It’s past time they acknowledged that daily pervasive persecution, which, unlike bloody terror attacks that reach news headlines, is just as detrimental and harms far more Copts.
They should also link cooperation to rights benchmarks: Trade preferences, migration cooperation, and security assistance should be conditioned on measurable progress—such as ending the misuse of blasphemy laws and ensuring due process.
Individual cases—such as that of Dr. Augustinos Samaan—should be raised publicly and consistently, not relegated to private diplomacy. In Europe, individual cases should be raised publicly in EU–Egypt dialogues, and in the U.S., cases like that of Dr. Samaan should be raised by senior officials and Members of Congress.
U.S. and EU trafficking, religious freedom, and human rights frameworks must recognize forced conversion and religiously motivated abductions as intersecting violations, as detailed in Coptic Solidarity’s trafficking documentation.
While the U.S. has withdrawn from a number of international mechanisms, including ECOSOC, members of the EU should work to protect and amplify the work of civil society organizations documenting abuses and press Egypt during Universal Periodic Review and treaty-body processes. The U.S. Congress should press for stronger action through USCIRF recommendations, the International Religious Freedom Act, and trafficking accountability mechanisms.
Long-term stability is undermined—not preserved—by systemic discrimination. Treating Copts as a domestic issue rather than a human rights concern perpetuates abuse.
Without these steps, Western engagement risks legitimizing a system in which discrimination is repackaged as ‘religious harmony’ and repression as ‘counter-extremism.’
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Uzay Bulut is a Turkey-born journalist formerly based in Ankara. She focuses on Turkey, political Islam, and the history of the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/author/uzay-bulut-1/
