The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights is a Bahraini non-profit non-governmental organisation which works to promote human rights in Bahrain, which was founded by a number of Bahraini activists in June 2002. The centre was given a dissolution order after its former president Abdulhadi Al Khawaja was arrested in September 2004 a day after criticizing the country's Prime Minister, Khalifah ibn Sulman Al Khalifah at a seminar in which he blamed the Prime Minister for the failure of widespread economic development for all citizens. The BCHR is still banned by the government, but has remained very active.
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. According to human rights groups, as of January 2020 there are some 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt. "The worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history" occurred during the dispersal of a sit-in on 14 August 2013, when as many as 900 protesters were killed.
Kareem Nabil Suleiman Amer is an Egyptian Norwegian blogger and former law student. He was arrested by Egyptian authorities for posts on his blog that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On 22 February 2007, in his native city Alexandria, Amer was sentenced to three years of imprisonment for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and one year for insulting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He was the first blogger in Egypt explicitly arrested for the content of his writing, and was released on 17 November 2010, but not before he was beaten and detained by Egyptian security forces. He thereafter moved to Bergen, Norway where he obtained political asylum and gained the Norwegian citizenship.
The April 6 Youth Movement(Arabic: حركة شباب 6 أبريل) 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.
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 documentary filmed in secret in Iran about Sotoudeh's "ongoing battles for the rights of women, children and minorities."
The Bahrain Thirteen are thirteen Bahraini opposition leaders, rights activists, bloggers and Shia clerics arrested between 17 March and 9 April 2011 in connection with their role in the national uprising. In June 2011, they were tried by a special military court, the National Safety Court, and convicted of "setting up terror groups to topple the royal regime and change the constitution"; they received sentences ranging from two years to life in prison. A military appeal court upheld the sentences in September. The trial was "one of the most prominent" before the National Safety Court. A retrial in a civilian court was held in April 2012 but the accused were not released from prison. The sentences were upheld again on 4 September 2012. On 7 January 2013, the defendants lost their last chance of appeal when the Court of Cassation, Bahrain's top court upheld the sentences.
Mohamed Ibrahim Moustafa, often referred to simply as Mohamed Ibrahim was the Minister of Interior of Egypt, from January 2013 until March 2015.
Dr. Mohamed El Ghanem is an Egyptian refugee detained without charge for seven years by the Geneva judiciary, between 2007 through 2013, allegedly in retaliation for refusing to spy on Geneva's Muslim community leaders.
Tora Prison is an Egyptian prison complex for criminal and political detainees, located in Tora, Egypt. The complex is situated in front of the Tora El Balad metro station. The main buildings in the Tora Prison complex are Tora Agricultural Prison, Tora Liman, Tora Istiqbal (reception), Tora El Mahkoum and Tora Supermax prison, also known as Scorpion Prison.
Mohamed Soltan is an Egyptian American human rights advocate and former political prisoner in Egypt.
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).
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 mass sexual assault of women in public has been documented in Egypt since 2005, when Egyptian security forces and their agents were accused of using it as a weapon against female protesters during a political demonstration in Tahrir Square, Cairo on 25 May. The behavior spread, and by 2012 sexual assault by crowds of young men was seen at protests and festivals in Egypt.
Bahey eldin Hassan is an Egyptian human rights defender and one of the founders of the Egyptian human rights movement in the 1980s. Hassan currently serves as the Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), which he cofounded in 1993. In 2014, and after receiving death threats for his human rights work, Hassan had to leave Egypt and currently lives in self-imposed exile in France. Hassan is also a journalist, lecturer, author and editor of several published articles, papers and books on human rights and democratic transformation in the Arab region.
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.
Amal Fathy is an Egyptian democracy activist and human rights defender. She is a former activist of April 6 Youth Movement and a member of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. She continues to be detained under house arrest by the Egyptian authorities since January 2019 for speaking out about sexual harassment in Egypt.
The 2019 Egyptian protests consisted of protests by over two thousand people 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.
The 2020 Egyptian Revolution, also known as the Gallabiya uprising, were decentralised street protests in Egypt that started on 20 September 2020, the anniversary of the 2019 Egyptian protests, calling for Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to resign. Protest locations included Cairo, Giza, Suez, Kafr El Dawwar, Alexandria, Aswan, El Qanater El Khayreya, Faiyum, Minya and Luxor. The sixth day of protests, on 25 September, was called a "Day of Rage".
Despite the “vibrant media culture” in Somalia – which hosts more than 90 media outlets and scores of websites and blogs – numerous violations aimed at journalists and political leaders are documented, including killings, attacks, arbitrary arrests and detention, intimidation, harassment, closure of media outlets, confiscation of equipment and blocking of websites.
