Reports
Cairo: June 2003

Introduction           Section one            Section two           Section three     

Summary of the 2002 Annual Report

Section One: The Legal Framework

 The Emergency Law is not a new feature in the Egyptian political-legal landscape; it reflects the policy of the Egyptian government of restricting personal and public freedoms and stifling the development of democratic institutions in Egypt.  The only legislative development in the field of human rights in 2002 is the negative development of the issuance of the NGOs Law (84/2002), which enshrined legal restrictions on NGOs and serves as a threat to the future of NGOs operating in Egypt.  This law is not different from its predecessors; indeed, it is even more restrictive than the previous legislation regarding NGOs (#153/1999) which was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Constitutional Court.

On the other hand, there have been positive rulings from the Supreme Constitutional Court and the administrative judiciary. The Supreme Constitutional Court issued a number of verdicts on the right to judicial access, the rights of children, the rights of women (manifest in the rejection of a constitutional challenge to the El-Khola law) as well as the regular judicial monitoring of administrative decisions. 

In 2002, the State Council and the administrative judiciary issued approximately 70 rulings related to human rights cases.  These verdicts were in relation to the right to form associations, the right to peaceful assembly, the freedoms of opinion and expression, the right of prisoners, and the right of mobility.  The most significant ruling was in a case involving coercive disappearance.  On November 26, 2002, the administrative judiciary ordered the Ministry of Interior to pay LE 100,000 to the family of a detainee who disappeared after being placed in detention in 1989.  The court held that the Ministry of Interior attempted to conceal and suppress information related to the whereabouts of this detainee, and that these acts – in conjunction with the disappearance itself – constituted a coercive disappearance.  The court stated that this was a blatant violation of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Egyptian Constitution and other international human rights instruments.  Moreover, the court held that the ministry was in breach of its obligation to provide information on the physical and psychological well-being of the victim to his family.