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Egyptian lawyer files complaint against rights defenders’ meeting with French president

February 1, 2019 at 12:02 am

Egyptian judge Mohammed Shirin Fahmi in Cairo, Egypt on 26 December 2018 [MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP/Getty Images]

An Egyptian lawyer filed a complaint on Wednesday to the country’s attorney general, demanding the arrest of a group of human rights advocates following their recent meeting with the French President Emmanuel Macron.

Tarek Mahmoud accused the executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Gamal Eid, the president of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, Mohamed Lotfy, the head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Gasser Abdel Razek, and the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), Mohamed Zaree, of “threatening national security and defaming the Egyptian state.”

The defendants, Mahmoud added, provided the French officials with false information on the political situation in Egypt. “They [the four rights defenders] held the government responsible for the enforced disappearances, torture inside prisons, and the detention of thousands of political detainees and opinion leaders,” he said.

Mahmoud pointed out that the four defendants aimed at “inciting the international opinion against the country [Egypt]” and conveying an “unreal representation” to Egypt’s current situation.

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He went on reiterating that the rights advocates of “insulted the Egyptian state and undermined Egypt’s national security.” The pro-regime lawyer claimed that the four men collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood group in what he described as “achieving its [Brotherhood] goals of bringing down the Egyptian state.”

In the complaint, Mahmoud called on the attorney general to “immediately start an investigation with the four men, arrest them, ban them from travelling outside Egypt until the investigation is completed, and refer them to an urgent criminal trial.”

On Tuesday, Macron met with the four men as part of his first official visit to Egypt. During the meeting, Zaree told Macron that the Egyptian government was “attacking human rights defenders and peaceful political opposition figures including secularists and Islamists, instead of combating terrorism.”

He called on the French government to “ensure that French weapons and communication technologies are not being used in Egypt against rights activists and peaceful political dissidents.”

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During a press conference held on Monday in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, Macron said that human rights in Egypt were perceived as worse now than under former toppled president Hosni Mubarak. “I think that’s becoming paradoxical and harmful for Egypt itself,” he warned.

In response, Sisi pointed out that Egypt was “not like Europe or the United States (US),” stressing that the country had its own special circumstances. He called on people “not to forget that the country [Egypt] is located in a troubled region.”