According to the National Human Rights Council, the dispersal of both protest camps that day left 632 people, including eight policemen, dead.
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In anticipation of protests to commemorate the anniversary, security was heavily deployed around major squares and in cities across Egypt. Authorities warned that any violent protests would be met with force.
Egypt Foreign Ministry’s statement said the call for worldwide investigations is a “ridiculous matter”, and the report also “neglects the assassinations of police personnel”.
The court-appointed legal team representing deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi filed an appeal on Saturday at the country’s highest court challenging sentences of life imprisonment and death handed down in June, Morsi’s lawyer said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged the UN Human Rights Council to establish an global commission of inquiry into the brutal clearing of the Rab’a al-Adawiya sit-in and other mass killings of protesters by the Egyptian security forces in 2013.
Hundreds of pro-Morsi demonstrators were killed when security forces violently dispersed their protest camps in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square and Giza’s Nahda Square on August. 14, 2013, only weeks after Morsi was removed from power in a military coup.
On Friday, Egyptians took to the streets to mark the second anniversary of the August 2013 attacks.
The killings likely amounted to crimes against humanity, the organization Human Rights Watch declared in a 188-page report published one year after the massacre.
Morsi is in prison and faces the death penalty- a verdict he can still appeal.
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The military-backed government of Sisi has overseen a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood supporters and other critics. Its popularity began to dramatically slide after Morsi took office in June 2012 and he decreed himself above any sort of oversight later that year and became increasingly perceived to be working for the Brotherhood and its supporters, not all Egyptians.
