The Zeinhom Criminal Court’s decision today to freeze the personal and organizational bank accounts of a group of leading and award-winning human rights lawyers and campaigners over politically motivated accusations that they are using foreign funds for illegal purposes is a reprehensible blow to Egypt’s human rights movement, Amnesty International said today.
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The court also froze the assets of three organisations and their directors; the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies and its director Bahey el-din Hassan, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and its director Mostafa al-Hassan, and the Egyptian Right to Education Center and its director Abdelhafiz Tayel. They could face prosecution and up to 25 years in prison.
An investigating magistrate had ordered the freeze in March pending approval from the court.
Dating back to 2011, the case has brought heavy criticism to Egypt since it started with Egyptian authorities raiding several NGOs and launching an investigation into foreign funding allegedly received by them.
“Today, the law took the day off”, he said.
Yesterday’s decision came ahead of a visit by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former army chief whose government is accused by rights groups of violations, to NY for United Nations General Assembly on September 20.
Sissi and the military-led government launched this sweeping crackdown after the 2013 ouster of democratically-elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
The court’s ruling came on the eve of el-Sissi’s departure for NY to attend meetings of the U.N. General Assembly, an occasion that he has in the past used to confer with foreign and congressional leaders.
Bahgat, Eid, and nine others are also banned from travel in connection to the case.
The crackdown comes at a sensitive time for Egypt, which has been battling an Islamic State insurgency in northern Sinai and a weak economy.
The five campaigners were swept up in a wider case against at least 12 rights groups that dates back to 2011, but which was revived previous year. Saturday’s ruling did not apply to the assets of the two groups. EIPR called on “political forces and popular movements that believe in the values of freedom and social justice to stand in solidarity with the Egyptian human rights movement and make every effort to ensure the movement can continue to play its vital role” in a statement after the ruling. “Egypt’s worldwide partners should not be fooled by repression cloaked in the guise of legalistic procedure”.
Amnesty International described the court order as a “shameless ploy to silence human rights activism”.
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“Egyptian authorities are single-mindedly pushing for the elimination of the country’s most prominent independent human rights defenders”, it quoted its Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson as saying in a statement.
