The State Information Service is an Egyptian government agency affiliated to the Egyptian Presidency. It is the official media and public relations apparatus of the Egyptian state, with a number of local and international offices, and it's responsible for regulating the affairs of foreign press and media correspondents in Egypt. [1]
The SIS was founded in 1954 as the Information Authority (maslahat al-isti'lamat, Arabic: مصلحة الإستعلامات) by the Revolutionary Command Council in the eve of the republican era, two years after the Free Officers led by colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled King Farouk and abolished the Monarchy. Revolutionary Command Council member Salah Salem was SIS's first Chairman.
In 1967 it was restructured into the State Information Service (SIS) and affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance (wizarat al-thaqafa wal-irshad al-qawmi), during Tharwat Okasha's tenure, and given the mandate of supporting the ministry in "identifying local and international public opinion towards issues and events that concern the state, and in the field of guiding, educating and enlightening local public opinion." [2]
The SIS was given ten main responsibilities, including gauging public opinion, producing and disseminating media on national issues (pamphlets, books, radio and television programs) to influence local and global public opinion, producing regular briefs for high level government agencies on key local and international political issues, regulating foreign journalism in Egypt, and regulating aspects of local journalism overseen by the ministry of culture. [2]
After the Ministry of Information (the scucessor of the National Guidance portfolio) was spun off the Ministry of Culture in the early 1980s, the SIS was officially transferred to it in 1986. [3]
In September 2012 President Mohamed Morsi issued a decree making SIS an agency subordinate to the presidency instead of the Ministry of Information. [4]
The SIS has had chairmen that served at high levels of government in the defense, information or foreign affairs ministries, as well as intelligence. The current Chairman of SIS, Diaa Rashwan a journalist and a former head of the Press Syndicate, he was appointed to the post by president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in June 2017. [5] Among the previous Chairmen of SIS was Safwat El-Sherif one of the leading and controversial figures in deposed president Hosni Mubarak's government.
Presidential Decree 1820/1967 mandated SIS to establish an international presence to share and disseninate facts about Egypt. Today, SIS operates 32 international press offices affiliate to Egypt's consular missions.
The politics of Egypt takes place within the framework of a republican semi-presidential system of government. The current political system was established following the 2013 Egyptian military coup d'état, and the takeover of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In the current system, the President is elected for a six-year term. Furthermore, the President has the power to dissolve Parliament through Article 137. The Parliament of Egypt is the oldest legislative chamber in Africa and the Middle East. The unicameral Parliament has the ability to impeach the President through Article 161. With 2020 elections to the new Senate, the chamber became bicameral.
The President of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the executive head of state of Egypt and the de facto appointee of the official head of government under the Egyptian Constitution of 2014 adopted after the 2013 Egyptian military coup d'état. Under the various iterations of the Constitution of Egypt following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the president is also the supreme commander of the Armed Forces, and head of the executive branch of the Egyptian government. The current president is Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has been in office since 8 June 2014.
The Cabinet of Egypt is the chief executive body of the Arab Republic of Egypt. It consists of the Prime Minister and the cabinet ministers.
Mohamed Safwat El Sherif was an Egyptian politician who served as chairman of the State Information Service, minister of information, speaker of the Egyptian Shura Council, and secretary general of the ruling National Democratic Party, and head of the Supreme Press Council.
The History of Republican Egypt spans the period of modern Egyptian history from the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 to the present day, which saw the toppling of the monarchy of Egypt and Sudan, the establishment of a presidential republic, and a period of profound economic, and political change in Egypt, and throughout the Arab world. The abolition of a monarchy and aristocracy viewed widely as sympathetic to Western interests, particularly since the ousting of Khedive Isma'il Pasha, over seven decades earlier, helped strengthen the authentically Egyptian character of the republic in the eyes of its supporters.
The Ministry of Information was the ministry in charge of state-owned media and press in Egypt, and for regulating the practices through affiliate agencies between 1971 until its latest dissolution in 2021.
The Egyptian Crisis was a period that started with the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and ended with the installation of a counterrevolutionary regime under the presidency of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2014. It was a tumultuous three years of political and social unrest, characterized by mass protests, a series of popular elections, deadly clashes, and military reinforcement. The events have had a lasting effect on the country's current course, its political system and its society.
Mohamed Mohamed Morsi Eissa al-Ayyat was an Egyptian politician, engineer, and professor who served as the fifth president of Egypt, from 2012 to 2013, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed him from office in a coup d'état after protests in June. An Islamist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood organization, Morsi led the Freedom and Justice Party from 2011 to 2012.
The cabinet of Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil was sworn in on 2 August 2012. Qandil was appointed by President Mohamed Morsi, following the resignation of military-named premier Kamal Ganzouri. The cabinet consists of 36 ministers. The composition of the government is mostly formed by technocrats, with five Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) members and one member each from the Al-Wasat and Renaissance parties.
Abd el-Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi is an Egyptian politician and retired military officer who has served as the sixth and current president of Egypt since 2014. Before retiring as a general in the Egyptian military in 2014, Sisi served as Egypt's deputy prime minister from 2013 to 2014, minister of defense from 2012 to 2013, and director of military intelligence from 2010 to 2012. He was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal in January 2014.
Adly Mahmoud Mansour is an Egyptian judge and politician who served as the president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt. He also served as interim president of Egypt from 4 July 2013 to 8 June 2014 following the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état by the military which deposed President Mohamed Morsi. Several secular and religious figures, such as the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the Coptic Pope, and Mohamed ElBaradei supported the coup against President Morsi and the military appointed Mansour interim-president until an election could take place. Morsi refused to acknowledge his removal as valid and continued to maintain that only he could be considered the legitimate President of Egypt. Mansour was sworn into office in front of the Supreme Constitutional Court on 4 July 2013.
The 30 June revolution occurred in Egypt on 30 June 2013, marking the one-year anniversary of Mohamed Morsi's inauguration as president. The events ended with the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état after mass protests across Egypt demanding the immediate resignation of the president. The rallies were partly a response to Tamarod, an ostensibly grassroots movement that launched a petition in April 2013, calling for Morsi and his government to step down. Tamarod claimed to have collected more than 22 million signatures for their petition by June 30, although this figure was not verified by independent sources. A counter-campaign in support of Morsi's presidency, named Tagarod, claimed to have collected 26 million signatures by the same date, but this figure was also unverified and not mentioned in media nearly as much as Tamarod's, with no reliable sources repeating it. The movements in opposition to Morsi culminated in the June 30 protests that occurred across the country. According to the Egyptian military, which calculated the number of protesters via helicopter scans of demonstration perimeters across the country, the June 30 protests had 32 million protesters, making them "the biggest protests in Egypt's history." However, independent observers raised concerns that the Egyptian government exaggerated the actual number of anti-Morsi protestors, with some research determining that only around one to two million people protested across the country against Morsi.
Presidential elections were held in Egypt between 26 and 28 May 2014. There were only two candidates, former Egyptian defence minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Egyptian Popular Current candidate Hamdeen Sabahi. El-Sisi won the election in a landslide victory, having received 97% of votes.
Mahmoud Badr is an Egyptian activist and journalist. He co-founded the Tamarod ("Rebel") movement and serves as its official spokesman and one of its principal leaders. Tamarod claimed to have gathered millions of signatures, that were never independently verified, demanding the resignation of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, and organized mass protests which preceded the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état removing Morsi from power. Recent audio tapes secretly recorded in the offices of the deputy ministers to Al-Sisi – and authenticated by independent expert analysis from France – establish the movement as an arm of the military coup. Senior officials of the coup are heard on the tapes bragging about how good they were at falsifying evidence against Morsi, at forgery and at torture. The list of plotters included Deputy Defense Minister Mamdouh Shaheen and Gen. Abbas Kamel, the chief of staff to Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the top military commander regarded as the mastermind behind the coup.
Hisham Muhammad Zaki Barakat was Prosecutor General of Egypt from 2013 to 2015. During his term as state prosecutor, he was responsible for thousands of controversial prosecutions, including several widely deemed politically motivated resulting in death sentences for hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. He was assassinated in a car bombing on 29 June 2015.
Mayada Ashraf, an Egyptian journalist for Al-Dostour in Cairo, Egypt, was killed by gunfire while covering the protest against the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi by supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the Ain Shams district of east Cairo. Ashraf was confirmed to have been fatally shot in the back of her head killing her on the scene. Her funeral was held on March 29, 2014, in Estanhaa Village at El Monotia.
Diaa Rashwan is an Egyptian journalist, politician and the current Chairman of the State Information Service. Rashwan graduated from Cairo University in 1981 with a Bachelor's degree in political science from Cairo University, he also received a Master's degree in the same field from the Paris based Sorbonne University in 1985. Rashwan began his career in Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in the early 1980s as a researcher and has been an expert scholar over there since then and many years later in 2011 he became the Director of the Center.
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.
The Egyptian Space Agency (EGSA) is an Egyptian space program founded in January 2018, succeeding the National Authority for Remote Sensing & Space Sciences (NARSS) as the premier space authority in Egypt. The EGSA headquarters are housed in the Egyptian Space City, which also houses the African Space Agency (ASA) headquarters, after Egypt won a bid to the African Union for its hosting in 2019. The EGSA operates under the scope of the Egyptian Government and sees many of its executive decisions made at a presidential level. EGSA is currently responsible for satellite launches and monitoring, as well providing a platform for affiliated STEM fields to further develop in Egypt. The EGSA and its predecessor have administered 10 satellites as of 2022, with the most recent being NILESAT-301 and HORUS-1.