Unprecedented Report on Egypt considered at UN Rights Council

Egyptian Gov. Rejects Criticism by UN Rights Investigator Unprecedented Report on Egypt considered at UN Rights Council: Government rejects Criticism by UN Rights Investigator (9 March, 2010 – Geneva) Egypt’s use of the Emergency Law to justify arbitrary detention and the use of exceptional courts was examined before the UN Human Rights Council today in a ground-breaking report presented by Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism. The report is the first issued by the main human rights body of the United Nations that deals exclusively with the human rights situation in Egypt. Representatives from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies attended the session in Geneva as observers and delivered oral interventions in which they supported the report’s recommendations and urged the government to implement them immediately. In his report, based on a mission to Egypt in April 2009, Mr. Scheinin highlighted that administrative detention orders repealed by the judiciary in Egypt are often “renewed immediately upon a person’s release or, in the worst case, just ignored through unacknowledged detention until a new order of official administrative detention is obtained.” The report of the Special Rapporteur also expressed concern over the fact that Egypt’s Emergency Law is often applied in situations where there is no link to terrorist activities, such as the frequent arbitrary detention of political activists and bloggers and the repeated use of military courts and state security courts in politically motivated cases. The Special Rapporteur also emphasized that when combined with the pending counter-terrorism law, Article 179 of the Egyptian Constitution as amended in March 2007 would create a permanent legal state of emergency...