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Five Years After the Revolution: Egypt’s Poorest Human Rights Record in its Modern History
It has been five years since the April Spring came to Egypt, unfortunately according to NGOs and human rights organizations this has not led to better conditions in the country. Human rights defenders in Egypt have said the country is experiencing an “unprecedented deterioration” in the status of human rights in its modern history.
The International Federation for Human Rights says that the government has moved passed the crackdown on political dissidence and moved on to just about every sector in the country including independent art and cultural venues. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated that Egypt had 23 journalists in jail in 2015, and the Egyptian Journalist Syndicate has that figure even higher at 32. CPJ put Egypt right behind China as the world’s second highest jailer of journalists.
On the run up to the anniversary of the revolution, the government has been cracking down and even blocked Facebook’s free internet service, internet.org as well as made massive arrests. There has also been a rash of “enforced disappearances.” The quasi-governmental National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) confirmed that it is working on cases of enforced disappearance. According to reports at least 41,000 people have been detained, charged, or sentenced between July 2013 and May 2014 on alleged terrorism charges. In February 2015, President Abdel al-Sisi acknowledged in a speech that there are innocent youth in prisons.
In 2015 alone the Egyptian courts laid down 470 death sentences for alleged terrorism related charges and many more were sentenced to life imprisonment for alleged political violence or activism. It should be noted that the Egyptian courts refrained from sentencing former Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarek to a death sentence or even a life sentence for his culpability in the deaths that were a resultant of the Arab Spring.