المركز المصري للحقوق الاقتصادية والاجتماعية | |
 | |
| Formation | 2009 [1] |
|---|---|
| Type | NGO |
| Headquarters | 1 El-Fadl St, From Talaat Harb St., Downtown Cairo, Egypt |
| Location |
|
| Website | Official website  |
The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR) is an Egyptian non-governmental legal and research organization which addresses issues of Egyptian and Arabic human rights. [2]
The ECESR sometimes coordinates with other NGOs to address human rights issues. [3] In a report titled 'Above the State' the ECESR suggested that increased foreign investment may not lead to improved conditions for most Egyptians. [4]
ECESR offices have been subjected to multiple raids by Egyptian police leading to protest from numerous other agencies. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
ECESR became well known during the 2019 Egyptian protests for its detailed documentation of arrests of protestors and random passers-by. On 26 September 2019, five days after protests started, ECESR listed 1909 arrests related to the protests. [11]
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Egypt face legal challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents.
Human rights in Egypt are guaranteed by the Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt 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. As of 2022, Human Rights Watch has declared that Egypt's human rights crises under the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is "one of its worst ... in many decades", and that "tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists, peaceful activists, and human rights defenders, remain imprisoned on abusive 'terrorism' charges, many in lengthy pretrial detention." International human rights organizations, such as the aforementioned HRW and Amnesty International, report that as of January 2020, there are some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. Other complaints made are of authorities harassing and detaining "relatives of dissidents abroad" and use of "vague 'morality' charges to prosecute LGBT people, female social media influencers, and survivors of sexual violence". The Egyptian government has frequently rejected such criticism, denying that any of the prisoners it holds are political prisoners.
The State Security Investigations Service was the highest national internal security authority in Egypt. Estimated to employ 100,000 personnel, the SSI was the main security and intelligence apparatus of Egypt's Ministry of Interior. The SSI focused on monitoring underground networks of radical Islamists and probably planted agents in those organizations and had the role of controlling opposition groups, both armed groups and those engaged in peaceful opposition to the government. It has been described as "detested" and "widely hated".
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights or EIPR is an independent Egyptian human rights organization, established in 2002. It is a Cairo-based think tank.
The Internet is accessible to the majority of the population in Egypt, whether via smartphones, internet cafes, or home connections. Broadband Internet access via VDSL is widely available. Under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, Internet censorship and surveillance were severe, culminating in a total shutdown of the Internet in Egypt during the 2011 Revolution. Although Internet access was restored following Mubarak's order, government censorship and surveillance have increased since the 2013 coup d'état, leading the NGO Freedom House to downgrade Egypt's Internet freedom from "partly free" in 2011 to "not free" in 2015, which it has retained in subsequent reports including the most recent in 2021. The El-Sisi regime has ramped up online censorship in Egypt. The regime heavily censors online news websites, which has prompted the closure of many independent news outlets in Egypt.
Crime in Egypt is moderate, but still occurs in various forms. Forms of crime include drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, corruption, black marketeering etc.
Egypt and the United States formally began relations in 1922 after Egypt gained independence from the United Kingdom. Relations between both countries have largely been dictated by regional issues in the Middle East such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Counterterrorism. But also domestic issues in Egypt regarding the country's human rights record and American support for the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi which the United States had come under controversy for in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and with many dissents of the current regime describing Sisi's rule as tyrannical.
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.
Khaled Mohamed Saeed was an Egyptian man whose death in police custody in the Sidi Gaber area of Alexandria on 6 June 2010 helped incite the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Photos of his disfigured corpse spread throughout online communities and incited outrage over the fact that he was beaten to death by Egyptian security forces. A prominent Facebook group, "We are all Khaled Said", moderated by Wael Ghonim, brought attention to his death and contributed to growing discontent in the weeks leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In October 2011, two Egyptian police officers were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison for beating Saeed to death. They were granted a retrial and sentenced to ten years in prison on 3 March 2014.
The 2011 Egyptian revolution, also known as the 25 January revolution, began on 25 January 2011 and spread across Egypt. The date was set by various youth groups to coincide with the annual Egyptian "Police holiday" as a statement against increasing police brutality during the last few years of Hosni Mubarak's presidency. It consisted of demonstrations, marches, occupations of plazas, non-violent civil resistance, acts of civil disobedience and strikes. Millions of protesters from a range of socio-economic and religious backgrounds demanded the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Violent clashes between security forces and protesters resulted in at least 846 people killed and over 6,000 injured. Protesters retaliated by burning over 90 police stations across the country.
The Hisham Mubarak Law Center is an Egyptian law firm based in Cairo and Aswan which "works in the field of human rights through litigation, campaigns and legal research" and is "perhaps best known for its active support of torture victims and Egyptians subject to arbitrary detention." Founded by Ahmed Seif El-Islam and other human rights defenders in 1999 it has become a major player in Egyptian Human rights advocacy issues.
Protests against the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état erupted in July 2013. Immediately following the removal of President Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian Armed Forces on 3 July 2013 amid demonstrations against Morsi's rule, many protesters amassed near the Rabia Al-Adawiya Mosque to call for Morsi's return to power and condemn the military, while others demonstrated in support of the military and interim government. Deadly clashes such as Rabaa massacre continued for several days, with three particularly bloody incidents being described by officials as "massacres" perpetrated by security forces. During the month of Ramadan, prime minister Hazem al-Beblawy threatened to disperse the ongoing Pro-Morsi sit-ins in Rabaa al-Adaweya square and al-Nahda square. The government crackdown of these protests occurred in a violent dispersal on 14 August 2013. In mid-August, the violence directed by the army towards the protesters escalated, with hundreds killed, and the government declaring a month-long nighttime curfew.
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.
Mohammed Adel is an Egyptian political activist and a founder of the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt. He has been active with the Kefaya movement since 2005 and is one of activists who called for a general strike on April 6, 2008. In 2009, Mohammed Adel became the April 6 movement's media spokesman. Between the time of the 2008 strike in Mahalla al-Kubra and the onset of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Mohemmad Adel enrolled in a training program directed by the Center for Non-Violent Action and Strategies, an entity founded by the Serbian pro-democracy youth movement Otpor!.
Nancy Okail is an Egyptian activist and a scholar with a focus in democracy and power relations of foreign aid. In 2013, Okail was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison in the controversial Egyptian court case against local and foreign non-governmental organization (NGOs).
In July 2013, at the same time as mass protests began against the 3 July coup d'état which deposed Mohamed Morsi, and in parallel with the escalation of the already ongoing jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, pro-Muslim Brotherhood militants started violent attacks against policemen and soldiers in Central and Western Egypt. In the following months, new Islamist armed groups were created to reinstate Islamist rule in Egypt, like Soldiers of Egypt and the Popular Resistance Movement. Since 2013, violence in mainland Egypt has escalated and developed into a low-level Islamist insurgency against the Egyptian government.
The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) (Arabic: المفوضية المصرية للحقوق و الحريات, romanized: al-Mafwaḍiyyah al-Miṣriyyah lil-Ḥuqūq wal-Ḥurrīyāt) 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.
The 2018–2022 Arab protests, known as Arab Spring 2.0 or Second Arab Spring, were a series of anti-government protests in several Arab countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, and Syria. Economic protests also took place in the Gaza Strip.
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.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
 | This Egyptian corporation or company article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |