(Washington, DC) – Egypt uses arbitrary travel bans to target key members of civil society for their peaceful work, including rights lawyers, journalists, feminists and researchers, FairSquare and Human Rights Watch said today.
The bans, which the authorities usually do not formally announce and do not provide a clear way to challenge them in court, have separated families, damaged careers and damaged the mental health of those who are exposed to them.
“Arbitrary and open travel bans allow the Egyptian authorities to impose a life-changing penal system that is barely visible to anyone other than those whose lives they are destroying,” said James Lynch, director of FairSquare. “The bans have allowed Egypt to silence its critics without fear of attracting resentment from its donors and supporters in London, Paris and Washington, DC. Egypt must end this arbitrary abuse practice immediately. “
FairSquare and Human Rights Watch spoke to 15 Egyptians who have been banned from traveling by the authorities for up to six years in some cases.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented that President Abdelfattah al-Sisi’s government has systematically used travel bans to block the journey of dozens of actual or perceived opponents. The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and the Freedom Initiative have also reported on the issue. The groups found that a Decree of the Minister of the Interior from 1994 gives security agencies comprehensive powers to impose travel bans without court orders for a renewable three-year period.
Those banned from traveling told FairSquare and Human Rights Watch that they were usually told about their travel ban at the airport when they tried to board a plane, and that the authorities did not provide clear legal ways to challenge these bans in court. One person said that he requested the public prosecutor, but the request was rejected without explanation. Another filed a lawsuit in the criminal court to overturn the ban, while a third demanded that the Egyptian minister, who hosts the administrative courts, intervene, but in both cases their requests were rejected. The lack of a clear legal basis for the bans and all means to challenge them underscore their arbitrary nature.
Of the 15 people interviewed, six were also facing the freezing of assets that have shut them out of the banking system completely.
The long-term personal burden of these travel bans and the freezing of assets has been devastating. Almost everyone who was interviewed described loss of job opportunities and income. Many said that the psychological impact of not knowing when these arbitrary restrictions would end has had serious consequences for their mental health. They also have a cooling effect on human rights activism as they discourage the public from criticizing the authorities.
Waleed Salem, a doctoral student, has been divorced from her daughter who lives abroad for four years and failed to complete her doctorate. at the University of Washington. He described the indefinite nature of his travel ban as an “endless nightmare”.
A human rights activist, Karim Ennarah, has not been able to stay with his wife in London, where they planned to live together, for 18 months, making him feel “like I’m ruining our marriage on my own. In April, a travel ban prevented a prominent lawyer, Nasser Amin, from presenting arguments at the International Criminal Court on war crimes in Darfur. It was his “lifelong dream” and a cause he had been working on for two decades.
Following an arbitrary freeze on assets since 2016, prominent feminist lawyer and founder of the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, Azza Soliman, could no longer work for the UN after losing access to the banking system, preventing her from receiving a salary. She also could not sell her car, as it would be considered to transfer an asset. Gasser Abdel Razek, a rights activist, said he was blocked from renewing his car’s license, apparently because it is an asset.
The travel bans have effectively put members of civil society on the sidelines who were in regular contact with politicians in the United States, Europe and the UN. Mohamed Zaree, Egypt’s director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, has been banned from traveling since 2016, preventing him from attending events such as the UN’s Universal Periodic Review of Egypt’s human rights record in 2019.
The passport of the award-winning human rights lawyer Mahienour El-Massry was confiscated by security agents when she returned from the Vaclav Havel human rights conference in Prague in 2018. She was arrested in September 2019 in the suppression of anti-government demonstrations and arbitrarily detained until 1 p.m. July 2021.
President al-Sisi has declared 2022 “the year of civil society”, part of a new human rights strategy Egypt unveiled in 2021 after 32 member states of the UN Human Rights Council criticized their rights record. The government has come under international scrutiny in 2022 because it will host COP27, the global climate summit, in November. Human Rights Watch has called Egypt’s election a “blatantly poor choice” in light of the country’s human rights crisis, including the extensive imprisonment of civil society activists and human rights defenders, and laws criminalizing peaceful assembly.
Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, both of which have been ratified by Egypt, everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own. Both treaties allow countries to impose restrictions on this right, but they must be clearly provided by law, necessary in a democratic society, proportionate to protect national security, public order, public health, morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and consistent. with other rights (including equality and non-discrimination). In order for any restrictions to be allowed, they cannot disprove the essence of the court.
Travel bans used as punishment for peaceful work, as in the cases of the people interviewed, are arbitrary and a violation of human rights, including when they are part of a politically motivated prosecution aimed at this activism. Anyone who has been banned from entering should be able to appeal the ban to a court.
The Egyptian constitution guarantees the right to freedom of movement in Article 62. It states that a reasoned court order is required to impose such restrictions, and even then this should only be for a certain period of time. These requirements were not met in any of the cases documented here.
“The Egyptian authorities should unconditionally lift all travel bans imposed to suppress human rights defenders or stop other members of civil society from carrying out their work and end the practice of imposing arbitrary bans,” said Amr Magdi, a senior researcher in the Middle East and North Africa. at Human Rights Watch. “Egypt’s strategic partners, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the homes of the families of several people under travel bans, should pressure Cairo to end such measures.”
Open use of travel bans, freezing of assets
The Interior Minister’s decree from 1994 gives the security authorities the upper hand when it comes to placing any person on travel ban lists. It does not say that those on a list must be informed or notified. It states that an administrative committee, consisting mainly of security officers, rather than judicial officials, can receive requests for appeal. Human Rights Watch and Fairsquare have not found evidence that such a committee was active, and no one interviewed in this report said they were able to find a way to communicate with the committee.
Even when the public prosecutor’s office or a judge or a court is involved, the Egyptian authorities have used arbitrary travel bans as punitive measures. Since 2015, a travel ban has been imposed on more than 30 activists in the infamous case 173 from 2011, in which the state has investigated dozens of non-governmental groups to receive foreign funding. At the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 alone, less than a handful of these activists were able to travel abroad. Many named in the case are still banned, although no one has been sent to court.
Many non-state group workers who were indicted in case 173 have had their assets frozen for years. At the time of writing, the assets remain frozen for 11 activists from case 173, including 2 who managed to have the travel ban lifted.
Egypt has pressured its critics with unlimited travel bans and the freezing of assets. Although these people have been spared from failing in prison, the measures require an often hidden but punitive duty on their personal and professional lives. These are some of their stories.
Nasser Amin, a prominent rights lawyer, has for two decades documented atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region with the aim of prosecuting war crimes. In December 2021, he was appointed by the International Criminal Court to represent Darfur victims – the first case from the Arab world to be tried in court. Most countries wanted to celebrate Amin’s success, but Egypt refused to allow him to attend the opening session on April 5, 2022.
Amin is the director of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and Legal Profession (ACIJLP), which advocates for legal independence. Amin and his wife, Hoda Abdelwahab, who serves as ACIJLP’s CEO, are among at least 31 employees of NGOs that have been banned from traveling since 2015. Their organization is caught in case 173, in which Egypt accuses non-governmental groups of obtain foreign financing. In 2021, an investigating judge began to end the investigation against some of the organizations and individuals. Initially, Amin, who also served as a member of the National Council for Human Rights under al-Sisi’s government, hoped that this would mean that he would be allowed to travel to The Hague. But the public prosecutor failed to respond to his request to travel. “It was my lifelong dream,” Amin said. He explained that he could only participate online, which prevented him from presenting arguments.
The travel ban has created chaos in Amin’s career. This prevented him from applying for positions at the UN for mandates related to torture and extrajudicial killings. He said his clients in Cairo began withdrawing from his private practice after a media campaign related to Case 173. “Many customers were scared away from the company,” he said. So many left that he said he had to sell his office space to pay for university tuition for his two children. Amin says he can not bear to see the sight of a plane passing over his head, because it reminds him of the ban. “It hurts just to hear the sound,” he said.
Amin told FairSquare and Human Rights Watch that it has never been so difficult to recruit new employees. “Banning all human rights activists sends a frightening message to the next generation,” he said. “No one can enter human rights now without paying a huge price.”
Waleed Salem is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Washington and a guest fellow at American University in Cairo. In May 2018, while completing his doctoral research on the Egyptian judiciary, plainclothes police handcuffed and blindfolded him and pushed him into a car as he left the office of a constitutional scholar in Cairo. “It was one of my last interviews,” he said. “I was going to go back to Seattle in June to teach.” Instead, he spent nearly seven months in Cairo’s Torah prison on charges of joining a terrorist organization and spreading false news.
Authorities have banned Salem from leaving Egypt ever since. During a hearing on 3 December 2018, the judge rejected the prosecutor’s appeal to keep him in prison. He was released a week later. His release order included probation; for the next fourteen months he had to report to a police station twice a week. When he was released, he had not received information indicating that he was banned from traveling. However, in May 2020, after completing his probationary period, he tried to return to the United States. National security agents at the airport questioned him and confiscated his passport.
Salem says the prison was easier than the “endless nightmare of open-ended imprisonment” he has experienced since. Before the arrest, he planned to move to be near his 13-year-old daughter, who lives in Poland with his ex-wife. He has not seen his daughter in over four years because his ex-wife is afraid to bring her to Egypt. “The last time I saw my daughter in February 2018, she was a little over 100 centimeters tall. Now she is almost 165 centimeters. She is a completely different person. “
The ban has derailed his doctorate. The University of Washington cut off his scholarship money, which was conditional on tuition in Seattle. The teaching scholarship was his primary source of income and was intended to help cover student debt. “Now I trust my siblings because I hardly make money,” he said. The whole ordeal threw him into depression. He has not been able to write, and he worries that follow-up interviews from Egypt are too risky.
The University of Washington and several US-based academies such as the Middle East Studies Association and the American Political Science Association have written letters to Egypt’s president, prosecutors and the National Council for Human Rights requesting that Salem be allowed to leave the country and return to his studies. but none of the letters received a reply.
Salem’s own request to the public prosecutor to lift the ban was rejected in February, after eight months of assessment, without explanation. Salem has spent the last decade studying the Egyptian judiciary, but he has not been able to bring this expertise to his own situation. “I am not able to wrap my mind around the cruelty of separating a father from his daughter for unspecified reasons – and with such ease,” Salem said.
Following the arrests in November 2020 of the then director of the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights (EIPR), Gasser Abdel Razek, and his colleagues Karim Ennarah and Mohammed Basheer, international condemnation of their detention led to their release after 15 days. Celebrities such as Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Scarlett Johansson were among those who had gathered for release.
However, the three soon discovered that they had been subjected to arbitrary travel bans and the freezing of property. After airport security officials refused to let Ennarah board a plane, citing a “legal order,” his lawyer went to the prosecution to find out if he was banned. Officials there said they had no knowledge of any legal order. It was only when Abdel Razek’s lawyer visited the prosecution’s office that officials called an unspecified “agency” and confirmed that a ban was in place.
Despite several requests, they have not yet received a hearing to appeal the freezing of assets, and the courts have refused to give them an appeal against their travel bans. The founder of EIPR, Hossam Bahgat, has also been subject to a travel ban and freezing of assets since 2016, as part of case 173. “It does not generate headlines such as photographs of people in handcuffs and in cages, and there is no outrage after a a travel ban, “Bahgat told FairSquare and Human Rights Watch. A fifth member of the organization, Patrick Zaki, is also under a travel ban after being released in December 2021, from 22 months in custody pending trial.
EIPR, established in 2002, is one of the country’s leading organizations, and the work of documenting and campaigning against human rights violations has made it a goal of the increasingly repressive policies of al-Sisi’s government. The group and its members face a number of measures that make it almost impossible for them to function normally.
EIPR employees during travel bans and freezing of assets said that the measures have dismantled their personal and professional lives. Before his arrest, Ennarah was to move to London to be with his wife, a British filmmaker. Because he can not travel, and she can not move her work to Egypt, the ban has forced them into a long-distance relationship, making him feel “lonely because of the separation, but also guilty most of the time.”
An Egypt-based university and a number of other organizations withdrew offers made to Ennarah because they would not or could not pay him outside the banking system. “There are times when I feel very depressed and isolated. Being unable to work is utterly devastating. It is a perpetual state of legal and financial limbo … I have been contacted for a few jobs, but they always withdraw the offer when they find out that I have a bank stop, he said.
One of the most difficult aspects for those affected by the bans is their open nature and their inability to challenge them. “In the background of my thoughts, there is always the thought of feeling permanently stuck. I know the process is only legal apparently,” Ennarah said.
Ennarah said many under ban find it difficult to ask for international solidarity and support for cases while so many other human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers melt down in Egypt’s prisons, facing torture and unfair trials. “It is a very effective silent method of persecution. Precisely because many people are in prison. It is almost considered a small price to pay in comparison.”
Abdel Razek was fired for a senior position in a large international organization after they learned that he was a “terrorist suspect” in an open case. He said: “What we have learned the hard way is that people assume that the case is closed when you are released … So I went through three [job] interviews, and I had one last interview to do with the leader of organization. In the last interview, I got the feeling that they do not realize that I am in fact a “terrorist suspect.” The asset freeze even prevented him from renewing his driver’s license.
In addition to the EIPR, few rights activists have raged against the Egyptian authorities as lawyer Gamal Eid. For decades, he has fought for freedom of expression and documented the state’s most gross violation of rights. The work has won him a number of international awards. If he was imprisoned, it would probably lead to international condemnation. To avoid this, Egypt has boxed him in in other ways.
Eid is the founder of The Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which is one of the groups caught in case 173. Eid was subject to a travel ban and his assets were frozen in 2016 as part of the case. In January 2022, ANHRI announced that it would shut down operations due to government intervention, but Eid has remained one of the state’s most vocal critics.
Eid’s wife, who is a US citizen, and daughter moved to New York in 2017. The ban has prevented Eid from visiting them. As a result, his American green card expired. Eid also lost much of his income, which came from human rights lectures, seminars and workshops he regularly led before the ban. Eid also lost work with international and UN units. “There have been many opportunities, but I can not work,” he said.
In 2019, he was violently assaulted on two occasions by people he believes were either members of the security service or people who worked under the leadership of the security services. The first time he suffered a rib fracture, and in the second attack he was attached to the ground and overfilled with paint. Eid said the assailants in the first attack wore walkie-talkies, a hallmark of security officials, since in Egypt it is illegal for civilians to wear these devices. His car was stolen the same year. “The winch and an officer in uniform were caught on camera,” Eid said. When he borrowed a friend’s car, it was also stolen. He said the judicial authorities did almost nothing to investigate the attacks.
For Eid’s organization, the freezing of assets was the last straw, after several employees had been the subject of arbitrary arrests and other forms of harassment over several years. A law from 2019 requires organizations to register with the authorities, but the freezing of assets made this impossible. “I can not even sign the papers or open a bank account due to the freezing of assets, so how can I register it?”
Patrick Zaki returned from Italy in February 2020 when he was arrested by National Security Agency officers at the airport in Cairo. During his interrogation, officers blindfolded Zaki for 17 hours, subjected him to electric shocks and beat him. Zaki, 31, is a researcher at EIPR and part of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. His alleged crime is “spreading false news” in connection with an article in July 2019 he wrote about discrimination in the everyday life of Christians in Egypt. Zaki was remanded in custody for almost two years. An emergency state security court, whose decisions cannot be appealed, began his trial in September 2021 and ordered in December 2021 that he be released while the trial was ongoing. He is awaiting the final court decision, and if convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
Zaki is a doctoral student at the University of Bologna, and is taking a Master of Arts in gender studies. He had only completed one semester when he was arrested. The day after his release in December 2021, he immediately applied for a new passport to return to Italy since his previous passport was confiscated and never returned.
“I wanted to travel right away to reach the semester and be there in time for the exam,” he said. When he was released by the court, he had no reason to believe that he had been banned from entering. But shortly after receiving a new passport, Zaki was informed by an intermediary with sources in the Ministry of the Interior that he was banned from traveling until the case is closed. Zaki submitted a request to the public prosecutor to allow his trip to Italy to complete exams until the next court hearing. It rejected the request without explanation.
Zaki’s court hearings have been adjourned since then. At the last court hearing, June 21, 2022, the judge adjourned the case until September 27, 2022. The upcoming session will mark a full year since the first hearing was adjourned, in September last year. The long delay has put Zaki in danger of having to drop out of school. With Covid-19 restrictions nearing an end, his university announced that from next fall, no more classes or exams will be administered online.
“If I’m kept here, I will not be able to complete my studies,” he said. “It’s going to be very harmful.” There is no similar study program at Egyptian universities. His plan had been to take a doctorate while continuing his research and advocating for religious minorities and genders in the Middle East. Now that plan is in jeopardy. “I love academia and I love human rights,” he said. “So I wanted to pursue both.”
Zaki’s longtime partner will return to Italy in September to continue his own studies. He is worried that they will be separated by his situation. “This is one of the biggest problems for me,” he said.
He added that the ban has also prevented him from attending several important professional conferences on human rights, including a recent one by Italy’s la Repubblica newspaper in Bologna where he was the keynote speaker. “I have tons of conferences to attend and very important events, but I can not go,” said Zaki. “This is affecting my career to a great extent.”
