Egyptian authorities have failed to make significant progress on critical human rights issues, according to a joint report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 4th Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Egypt by DIGNITY – the Danish Institute against Torture, the Middle East Democracy Center, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Committee for Justice, Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, Egyptian Front for Human Rights, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, El Nadeem Center against Violence and Torture, and REDRESS. This report, scheduled for review in the 48th session (January–February 2025), calls for urgent reforms to address the Egyptian government’s severe human rights violations perpetrated against human rights defenders, activists, LGBTIQ+ individuals, academics, journalists, lawyers, and opposition politicians, among others. 

The report, submitted on July 16, 2024, highlights the human rights abuses that remain rampant throughout Egypt’s legal system, despite the Egyptian government’s continued efforts to whitewash its reputation. These abuses, which include torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, unfair trials, and inhumane conditions in detention centers, are so regular and widespread that it is clear they are perpetrated systematically.

This UPR submission calls for urgent action to address and rectify the systemic perpetration of human rights violations in Egypt. These actions include: 

  1. Institute legal reforms to ensure that Emergency Law No. 162 of 1958, Articles 126 and 129 of the Egyptian Penal Code, the Egyptian Criminal Procedure Code, and all other relevant laws and practices, are brought into conformity with its international human rights obligations.
  2. Repeal Egypt’s Counter-Terrorism Law and abolish the use of exceptional Terrorism Circuits Courts and exceptional courts such as the Emergency Supreme State Security Courts (ESSSCs).
  3. End incommunicado detention in all detention centers, guarantee the rights of prisoners to regular family visits, medical treatment and access to lawyers, including in high-security prisons. Ensure that all prisoners are provided with the minimum standards of humane treatment, including protection from all forms of torture and other ill-treatment.
  4. Direct the National Security Agency and the National Police to ensure to produce and maintain official records of detention, which are easily accessible by lawyers, the judiciary, the National Human Rights Institution, and human rights Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
  5. Reduce the use of detention, especially pretrial detention; refuse to use confessions extracted under any ill-treatment as evidence in any proceeding (except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made); and, halt judicial processes (at any stage) if there is any suspicion of torture or ill-treatment.
  6. Ensure that prison doctors and forensic doctors act with clinical independence, objectivity and impartiality, and according to international standards.
  7. Ensure effective, timely, and appropriate reparations to survivors of torture and their families.
  8. Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, prosecute all perpetrators of torture, and immediately end the practice of torture and ill-treatment in all places of detention.
  9. Take measures to implement all the recommendations and decisions issued by HRC, CAT, CRC, other UN Treaty Bodies, UN Special Procedures, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACommHPR). 
  10. Extend a standing invitation for country visits to the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), including the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and allow her to meet detainees, victims and their families, as well as independent Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

Read the full report here.