The Egyptian embassy in the US has tweeted a statement connecting human rights defenders who communicate with members of US Congress on abuses committed by the Egyptian regime with terror organizations.
Last year Joe Biden promised there would be no more blank cheques for Trump’s “favorite dictator”, pledging that he would get tough on Sisi’s government over human rights abuses.
However, the embassy praised in the same thread the Biden administration’s “tremendous support” in bolstering bilateral relations between Egypt and the US.
This week, the Biden administration voiced its support for the US and Egypt’s security relationship on the grounds that Egypt plays a vital role in managing the Suez Canal and its role in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire in May, despite pressure from human rights advocates to leverage military aid on improved human rights.
Advocacy Officer for the Washington Advocacy team at Human Rights Watch (HRW) Elisa Epstein tweeted a screenshot of the embassy’s tweet and added: “This tweet from Egypt’s embassy in the US is deeply harmful & concerning. Those of us who rightly inform members of Congress of Egypt’s human rights record are providing important context to push the US to abide by its own and intl law standards in setting US policy.”
In October last year, UN experts said that Egypt was using exceptional terrorism circuit courts to target human rights defenders, silence dissent and detain activists.
Human rights defenders in Egypt are regularly added to terrorist lists after arbitrary proceedings, HRW has documented, and security forces have arbitrarily arrested and detained thousands of people on unfounded terrorism-related charges.
War crimes and grave human rights abuses have been committed in Sinai in the name of counterterror, including extrajudicial killings, the torture of children and mass displacement and the destruction of homes.
Egypt slammed for unjustly jailing women
Nine Senate Democrats have called for the release of Sanaa Seif, an activist who was sentenced to a year and a half in prison in March for allegedly spreading false news.
Sanaa was arrested in June last year after she slept with her sister and mother Laila Soueif outside the prison where her brother, the prominent political activist Alaa Abdelfattah, is being held.
In the same context, Democrats Tom Malinowski and Adam Schiff are advocating for cutting $75 million of the $1.3 billion assistance to Egypt over the Sisi regime’s detention of political prisoners and the harassment of American citizens including Mohamed Soltan and Aly Hussin Mahdy.
Chairman of the Senate panel on the Middle East, Senator Chris Murphy, has called on the government to withhold a waiver on $300 million of the aid on the grounds that the Egyptian military focuses “more on internal repression than on regional security.”
Last year Joe Biden promised there would be no more blank cheques for Trump’s “favorite dictator”, pledging that he would get tough on Sisi’s government over human rights abuses.
However, the Biden administration later announced the sale of $200 million of shipborne surface-to-air missiles to Egypt just days after Soltan’s family members were arrested by the regime after he filed a lawsuit in the US against a former Egyptian prime minister for overseeing his torture whilst in prison.
Also, this week the US government voiced support for the US and Egypt’s security relationship.
