Human rights in Egypt are guaranteed by the Egyptian Constitution under the various articles of Chapter 3. The country is also a party to numerous international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, the state of human rights in the country has been criticized both in the past and the present, especially by foreign human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, although the Egyptian government has frequently rejected such criticism. International human rights organizations such as the aforementioned HRW and Amnesty report that as of January 2020, there are some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt, although the government has often denied that there are any political prisoners in response. "The worst mass killing in Egypt's modern history" occurred on 14 August 2013 during the dispersal by police of a sit-in held by supporters of the late Mohamed Morsi, where hundreds of protesters were killed.
The role of women in Egypt has changed throughout history, from ancient to modern times. From the earliest preserved archaeological records, Egyptian women were considered equal to men in Egyptian society, regardless of marital status.
Egypt–Italy relations refer to relations between Egypt and Italy. Both nations are members of the Union for the Mediterranean and the United Nations.
The April 6 Youth Movement is an Egyptian activist group established in Spring 2008 to support the workers in El-Mahalla El-Kubra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on 6 April.
Hossam Bahgat is an Egyptian human rights activist and the founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. He is an investigative journalist at Mada Masr. He was the 2011 recipient of the Alison Des Forges Award from Human Rights Watch "for upholding the personal freedoms of all Egyptians".
Nasrin Sotoudeh is a human rights lawyer in Iran. She has represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections as well as prisoners sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors. Her clients have included journalist Isa Saharkhiz, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Heshmat Tabarzadi. She has also represented women arrested for appearing in public without a hijab, which is a punishable offence in Iran. Nasrin Sotoudeh was the subject of Nasrin, a 2020 documentary filmed in secret in Iran about Sotoudeh's "ongoing battles for the rights of women, children and minorities." In 2021, she was named as of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Women played a variety of roles in the Arab Spring, but its impact on women and their rights is unclear. The Arab Spring was a series of demonstrations, protests, and civil wars against authoritarian regimes that started in Tunisia and spread to much of the Arab world. The leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were overthrown; Bahrain has experienced sustained civil disorder, and the protests in Syria have become a civil war. Other Arab countries experienced protests as well.
Rape in Egypt is a criminal offense with penalties ranging from 15 to 25 year and a lifetime sentence if the rape included abduction. Marital rape is legal. By 2008, the U.N. quoted Egypt's Interior Ministry's figure that 20,000 rapes take place every year, although according to the activist Engy Ghozlan (ECWR), rapes are 10 times higher than the stats given by Interior Ministry, making it 200,000 per year. Mona Eltahawy has also noted the same figure (200,000), and added that this was before the revolution.
Yara Sallam is a prominent Egyptian feminist and human rights advocate. She has worked as a lawyer and researcher for several Egyptian and international human rights organizations, as well as for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).
Mohamed Fadel Fahmy is an Egyptian-born Canadian journalist, war correspondent and author. He has worked extensively in the Middle East, North Africa, for CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera English.
On December 29, 2013, three journalists working for the Qatari-based international news channel Al Jazeera English, Australian Peter Greste, Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohamed were taken into custody by Egyptian security forces at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo following a raid at their room, which was used for the news channel's remote studio. The Egyptian Interior Ministry confirmed the arrest and said the journalists were accused of reporting false news which was "damaging to national security".
The Arab Sharkas case is the name given to the military trial of nine men in Egypt in August 2014. Six defendants were sentenced to death in October, and executed in May 2015.
Giulio Regeni was an Italian Cambridge University graduate who was abducted and tortured to death in Egypt. Regeni was a PhD student at Girton College, Cambridge, researching Egypt's independent trade unions, and a former employee of the international consulting firm Oxford Analytica. He grew up in Fiumicello, a former comune in the province of Udine in northeastern Italy.
Academic freedom in the Middle East is a contested and debated issue, which has caught regional and international attention. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, in general, the authoritarian regimes have all showed a certain degree of opposition to every sort of freedom, academic one not excluded, regardless of the type of regime basis they had. Freedom for academicians to inquiry, research, teach and communicate ideas or report facts without being threatened or persecuted or with the possibility of losing their position, being censored or repressed is threatened. What contributes to academic freedom violations is also that they are essential elements for the regimes to maintain their power and in addition to this issue, interstate and civil wars as well as internal disorders and external intervention can damage educational structures and institutions. Additionally, as far as the regime is concerned, a security or national threat can be a pretest for suffocate or suspend academic research and debate. Restrictions on academic freedom also regards the topics of research, which are under significant constraints, although these might be highly interesting and worth researching.
Ibrahim Metwaly Hegazy is an Egyptian lawyer and human rights activist and a member of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. In September 2017, Metwaly was detained by the Egyptian security services. He had been investigating the death in Egypt of the Italian student Giulio Regeni. On 10 September 2017, Metwaly was thrown into Tora Prison.
The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) is an Egyptian human rights organisation based in Cairo. The organisation has been subject to continuous harassment by the Egyptian authorities after reporting on human rights abuses by the el-Sisi government. ECRF is one of the very few human rights organisations still operating inside a country increasingly hostile to dissent and in which countless civil society organisations have been forced to close. The commission coordinates campaigns for those who have been tortured or disappeared, as well as highlighting numerous incidences of human rights abuses.
Mohamed Lotfy, a human rights defender, is the co-founder and executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), an organisation that works in several governorates of Egypt in the defence of human rights in the country. Before moving back to Cairo and co-founding ECRF in 2013 he was a human rights researcher at Amnesty International in London.
The 2019 Egyptian protests were mass protests in Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta and other cities on 20, 21 and 27 September 2019 in which the protestors called for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to be removed from power. Security forces responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and, as of 23 October 2019, 4300 arbitrary arrests had been made, based on data from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, among which 111 were minors according to Amnesty International and the Belady Foundation. Prominent arrestees included human rights lawyer Mahienour el-Massry, journalist and former leader of the Constitution Party Khaled Dawoud and two professors of political science at Cairo University, Hazem Hosny and Hassan Nafaa. The wave of arrests was the biggest in Egypt since Sisi formally became president in 2014.
Events in the year 2020 in Egypt.
Patrick George Zaki is a Coptic Egyptian postgraduate student at the University of Bologna, Italy, who has been detained in Egypt since 7 February 2020. Zaki is pursuing an Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Bologna. He also conducts research and advocacy on gender issues and human rights for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a human rights organization based in Cairo. On 9 December 2021, Zaki was released from prison. The charges against him have not been dropped, and he is set to attend a hearing on April 6, 2022.
