By Bahieddin Hassan Several human rights organisations, both local and international, have recently accused the Egyptian government of committing serious human rights violations and introducing constitutional and legislative amendments that breach international norms. It is no secret that torture of political and non- political detainees is an ongoing practice in this country. A trickle of cases come to court, but most go unpunished. For most of the 20 years or so I have been working in the field of human rights, torture was a common practice. Torture remains unchanged in its cruelty and inhumanity. Only the names of the victims change. The only new thing, after those 20 years, is that the officers conducting the torture know now that they are immune to punishment and accountability. They feel so secure about their gruesome practices that they started photographing their victims, especially women, during torture, just for fun. Last month, Amnesty International issued a report reiterating the usual charges. The same charges have been often made by other rights groups. And the first annual report -- though only that report -- of the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) contains the same charges. Torture, Amnesty International said, is both systematic and widespread. Two of our ministers -- Ahmed Abul-Gheit and Mufid Shehab -- dismissed the report as untrue. They didn't discuss the report case by case. They simply denied it out of hand. The Interior Ministry, which is the concerned party, said nothing. There is nothing new in that. What is new is that NCHR Deputy Director Ahmed Abul-Magd also dismissed the report as untrue. Speaking two full days before any of our ministers responded, Abul-Magd said that the report was "inaccurate", using the same word the ministers later used, the same word the government used in the past to discredit the NCHR's first annual report. That was the first time in the history of the NCHR that one its officials disclaim human rights abuses. It is one thing for the NCHR to fail to protect human rights in this country, which is sadly true. But for the NCHR to be a guard dog for the government, that's much worse. This week's Soapbox speaker is director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.
