Amnesty International warns that Egypt's new constitutional amendments will perpetuate systematic abuses by the security forces. Gihan Shahine investigates For the second time in less than two months, Egypt received harsh criticism for its security practices and torture in prisons. Amnesty International issued a highly critical report last week on what it described as "the systematic abuses" of human rights in Egypt, which are committed "in the name of security". Documenting shocking "systematic" abuses committed by police officers and State Security Investigation (SSI) services under the decades-long state of emergency is nothing new. Several local and international reports have uncovered similar cases, most recently the US Bureau of Democracy on 6 March. What is significant about this report, however, is the connection that it makes between current abuses, the new constitutional amendments and anti-terrorism legislation. Amnesty warns that the new law will perpetuate, and even "entrench patterns of abuse witnessed in the past 40 years", into "permanent emergency-style powers that had led to serious human rights violations for decades". The document stated that "Amnesty International fears that the constitutional amendments and the planned anti-terrorism law will be used to further stifle peaceful political dissent, as well as cement patterns of serious abuses by security forces." The report has prompted the usual -- and perhaps typical -- speedy and sharp response from the government, which slammed the report as "inaccurate and unfair". A Foreign Ministry statement countered that Egypt has made "real and continuous progress in the field of human rights". It noted the creation of the state-affiliated National Council of Human Rights (NCHR) as an example. But the NCHR -- which has also denounced the report -- has earned a reputation among human rights activists as being no more than a government window-dressing. Those in the field insist that human rights conditions are in fact far worse than mentioned in the report. "The government has always reacted the same way to international reports on human rights abuses, and even uses the very same wording," scoffed Baheieddin Hassan, the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Right Studies. Those abuses, Hassan insisted, have been repeatedly mentioned "in local and international reports since 1990, with no change whatsoever except in the names of the victims." He lamented that the government has continuously ignored local reports, including that of the NCHR, "which has ironically criticised the Amnesty report as inaccurate, oblivious to the fact that almost the same cases were recorded in its own first annual report." Like many, this activist is not optimistic that government attention to international reports would actually yield any significant change in policy. "Government sensitivity to foreign criticism only translates into official responses, but it is obvious that the regime has no intention of dealing with any of the violations recorded in those reports," noted Hassan. He mentioned the government's unwillingness to deal with the UN anti-torture and anti-terror commissions as a case in point. But at the same time Hassan does not undercut the usefulness of critical reports. "After all, they do increase public awareness of the problem and may achieve results in the very long run," he stated. Amnesty's document showed how "torture...arbitrary arrests and detentions, and grossly unfair trials before emergency and military courts have all been key features of Egypt's 40- year state of emergency and counter-terrorism campaign." These factors, the report continued, put extensive powers in the hands of law enforcers, especially SSI officers. "Those extra-legal powers granted to officers will now further gain constitutionality under the new amendments -- which will not only increase incidents of torture and abuse, but also give police officers more confidence that they will never be held accountable for those abuses," noted Hassan. He continued that the very fact that police officers now take snapshots with their mobile phones of prisoners being tortured is a significant development. The report displayed the various patterns of torture, which it said were "pervasive in police stations and prisons [where] 18,000 people were jailed without trial". Those prisoners, the document added, "are languishing in Egypt's jails in degrading and inhumane conditions", some for more than a decade and despite repeated court rulings ordering their release. Patterns of torture include electric shock, beating, suspension by the wrists or ankles, suspension in contorted positions from a horizontal pole and various forms of psychological torture, including threats to kill and rape the detainees or their female relatives. Many died as a result of torture, Amnesty noted, while relatives of suspects have been rounded up too, and then threatened and abused. One of the most shocking cases revealed in the report was that of 21-year-old taxi driver Emad Mohamed, known as Emad El-Kebir, who was sodomised and tortured during his detention in Bulaq Al-Dakrour Police Station. Mohamed was arrested after trying to stop an argument between police officers and his cousin, and although the Prosecutor-General ordered his release on bail, police took him back to prison and he was subsequently sentenced to three months imprisonment for "resisting the authorities" and "assaulting a police officer". After a video displaying the torture was circulated on the Internet, however, two officers from Bulaq Al-Dakrour Police Station were charged with the unlawful detention, torture and rape of Emad El-Kebir -- a rare case when officers are held legally accountable. The report further highlighted how Egypt has become an international centre for interrogation and torture, where foreign countries ---- most notably the UK and the US -- use the process of "renditions" to send terrorism suspects to be interrogated as part of the war on terror. "These transfers have been carried out unlawfully, without any due process and in clear breach of the principle of non-refoulement -- the absolute prohibition of sending anyone to a country where they would be at risk of serious human rights abuses such as torture and other ill-treatment, or enforced disappearance," the document stated. The report highlights five cases of unlawful transfers to torture (rendition), the most significant of which, perhaps, is the high-profile case of Osama Mustafa Hassan (alias Abu Omar). Hassan was allegedly rendered from Milano, Italy, by the CIA and transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured and sodomised for seven months by security officials, according to an 11-page personal account obtained by Amnesty. Now that the new constitutional amendments have been approved despite severe opposition, Hassiba Hajj Sahraoui, Amnesty's Middle East deputy director, expects things to get even "worse, in the sense that the few safeguards that we had in the Constitution are now being attacked". The report particularly slammed the amendment to Article 179, which paves the way to a proposed anti-terrorism law, slated to replace the current Emergency Law, as "particularly draconian". The amended article removes all legal constraints and safeguards against arbitrary arrest and detention, police searches without a warrant and eavesdropping on telephone calls and other private communications. The amended article -- condemned as the most notorious by the opposition as well as legal and human right experts -- also allows the president to bypass ordinary courts and refer suspected terrorists to any judicial authority of his choosing. These include military and emergency courts which have no right of appeal and a long history of conducting unfair trials. "What we see and fear with the new law is a broad definition of terrorism crimes, that would criminalise the peaceful exercise of rights that are guaranteed internationally," noted Sahraoui. Hassan corroborated Sahraoui's fears, saying that "the new anti-terrorism law includes details that are even worse than the very worst expectations of those who are most pessimistic of all." He believes that "students at the Police Academy are eagerly awaiting this law to be passed, so they would have immense power and no accountability." Other amendments were also "politically motivated", according to Amnesty. These include the one which bans the establishment of political parties based on religion, "apparently targeting the opposition Muslim Brotherhood following its success in the 2005 elections, when it won 88 seats," stated the report. The document was equally critical of other amended articles, including one which reduces the role of judges in supervising elections and referendums. "[This is] apparently a response to what happened in 2006, when two senior judges denounced the government's failure to act in response to evidence of electoral fraud during the 2005 elections," noted the report. Another, is one allowing the president to dissolve parliament unilaterally. More significantly, the report casts a shadow on the legitimacy of the amendments since they were approved by parliament in the absence of opposition MPs, who had staged a walk-out to protest the changes. A public referendum on the amendments on 26 March similarly witnessed abuses and heavy security interference, as "armed police were deployed in the streets in response to a wave of protests around the country." Although authorities said the amendments were approved by more than three-quarters of voters in a turnout of 27 per cent, Amnesty quoted independent national monitoring groups as saying the turnout was no more than 10 per cent. The low figure has indeed been corroborated by local reports. According to a report by the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), average voting rates at ballot stations across the country recorded between two to three per cent of registered voters, as a result of public indifference to the proposed amendment. The EOHR said that the absence of judicial supervision over the entire voting process paved the way for the manipulation of the people's will, and allowed for some practices and violations which negatively affected the will of the voters. Among these practices were the low participation of voters (which reached zero per cent at some stations), pre-marked balloting cards, mass voting, preventing civil society observers from entering polling stations, mistakes in voting lists, and preventing voters from entering ballot stations. EOHR observers also recorded many violations inside polling stations, such as bribes, lack of phosphoric ink, and banners advocating the amendments.
