Egypt’s extension of emergency law means continued rights violations

Commentary

Egypt’s extension of emergency law means continued rights violations

May 28, 2008 10:39:00 am

Edited by:

Bill Van Esveld [Arthur Helton Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Division, Human Rights Watch]: "The Egyptian government has extended for two more years Law 162 of 1958 that authorizes prolonged detention without charge and severe limitations on freedom of assembly and expression. Egypt's state of emergency, first implemented in 1967, has been continuously in force throughout President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule. The emergency law has provided a dubious basis in law for the government's systematic stifling of political opposition and violations of individual rights.

Law 162 allows the executive to indefinitely detain persons without charge, and an estimated 5,000 persons remain in long-term detention without charge or trial under the law. The law also allows authorities to refer civilians to a separate system of military or exceptional state security courts, whose composition is determined by the president and where the accused has no right of appeal, in violation of international fair trial standards. In February 2006 President Mubarak, using his authority as commander-in-chief, ordered a group of 40 senior Muslim Brotherhood members to be tried by a military court shortly after an ordinary criminal court had dismissed charges against 17 of them. The military tribunal recently sentenced 25 of the group to prison terms of up to 10 years.

The emergency law allows the government to prohibit strikes, demonstrations and public meetings. On April 6 and 7, 2008, security forces prevented textile workers from striking in the Nile delta city of Mahalla, violently dispersed protests against rising costs of food and basic goods, and detained scores, including many on-line activists who had promoted the strike. When Egypt's prosecutor-general ordered the release of 20 detainees a week later, the Interior Ministry invoked the emergency law to re-arrest them, according to news reports.

These human rights violations have made the law widely unpopular. Opposition parties, the Muslim Brotherhood, NGOs, UN treaty-monitoring bodies, and Egypt's government-backed National Council for Human Rights have objected to the law. Nonetheless, human rights defenders are anxious at the prospect of a counter-terrorism law that the government says is being drafted so that the state of emergency will no longer be "necessary.""

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Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.