A sudden and remarkable rise of the human rights issue in Egypt. It began to resonate clearly in the Western world, and its features took shape in the headlines of the Middle East pages in international newspapers since last month, which coincided with the radical transformation that American foreign policy is expected to witness with the departure of the administration of right-wing President Donald Trump, and the rise of a Democratic administration headed by Joe Biden. Although many analysts link this transformation to the Biden administration, the matter seems to be deeper than that, as the first of these criticisms came from US President Donald Trump himself, who previously stated that he has a deep friendship with his “favorite dictator,” Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, but he returned and launched a fierce attack on him, with regard to the military support that Egypt receives from the United States.
American criticism
Trump accused the Egyptian army of using American funds to purchase Russian weapons, which prompted him to hint at rejecting the new budget bill to revive the economy to confront the Corona pandemic. Trump criticized the foreign aid item in the new budget amounting to $892 billion, and said that it wasted Americans’ money. Trump gave an example of this with the American aid that goes every year to Egypt. The US Congress had passed, in the government spending budget law for next year, the usual military aid to Egypt, which amounts to about 1.3 billion dollars, which is a fixed amount annually that Egypt receives from the United States of America following the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement in 1978, but Congress linked the release of more than 300 million dollars of funds allocated to Egypt with achieving progress in the release of political and human rights prisoners and religious minorities. A clause in the law stipulates the freezing of $75 million until the US Secretary of State submits a report to inform legislators of the progress achieved by Cairo in the field of prisoner release. Another clause linked the release of $225 million from the grant to strengthening the principle of the rule of law and supporting democratic institutions and human rights, including the protection of religious minorities. The Freedom Initiative website considered that lawmakers sent a strong message to Egypt that its systematic use of detention to silence activists and journalists does not serve the national security interests of the United States.
European position
The European Parliament, in turn, voted last December 19 on a draft resolution calling on European institutions to take serious steps to stop human rights violations in Egypt, coinciding with the escalation of the case of the murder of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in Egypt in 2016. The text of the resolution, which was issued by a large majority, includes a demand for the release of prisoners of conscience. It also called for an end to restrictions on the work of civil society organizations and their workers, in addition to establishing a mechanism at the end of this January to monitor and report on human rights violations in Egypt. Voting was held by email for precautionary considerations related to the Corona pandemic. European Parliament President David Sassoli said, “We want the truth for Giulio Regeni and the extradition of his killers, and we want freedom for Patrick Zaki.” He added that the European representatives assured Egypt today that there is no compromise on truth, justice and human rights. The draft resolution was issued with the approval of 434 out of 685 European representatives, and included two clauses demanding that the Egyptian authorities cooperate in the case of Giulio Regeni and hand over those accused of killing him to the Italian judiciary. The United Nations said, one day after the European Parliament’s statement, that any possible sanctions decision by the European Union against Egypt is considered sovereign. The spokesman for the Organization’s Secretary-General, Stephane Dujarric, said that the European Union’s decisions are sovereign, and it is not for us to address what it may or may not decide, and he stressed that what the Union will do in this regard is up to it.
Regeni…the password
Given these official positions issued by the American and European sides, the matter began at the beginning of last December, when the European Commission asked the Egyptian authorities to cooperate with the Italian judiciary in the investigations into the killing of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni. Regeni is an Italian researcher who was preparing a study in Egypt on labor movements when he disappeared in a police station in Cairo on January 25, 2016, only to find his body 9 days later bearing signs of torture. Speaker of the Italian House of Representatives, Roberto Fico, stressed the need to activate a dialogue within the institutions of the European Union, to make an important breakthrough in the issue of human rights in Egypt, after the Italian prosecution announced its suspicion of 4 members of the Egyptian security forces, including an officer holding the rank of General Intelligence, named Aser Kamel, in the case of the student’s disappearance and murder. Fico said that after everything that emerged from the judicial investigations into the murder of citizen and researcher Giulio Regeni, “we must be an angrier country.” He confirmed that he had personally initiated action at the European level to shed light on human rights violations in Egypt, adding that the European Union must take strict decisions against it, saying that there are other European countries waiting to seize the opportunity to overcome this.
