CAIRO: The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies called on the government to address the problems of repeated attacks against Coptic Christians and the Nubians' right to return to their original homeland, the right of Sinai Bedouins to own their land and to put an end to their persecution of them by security forces. The institute called on the government to address these issues in its report to the United Nations on economic, social and cultural rights in Egypt. The center called, in a meeting held by the Human Rights Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for mentioning the restrictions imposed on the rights of workers to strike that the report prepared by the government and set to be sent to the United Nations in February. The institute also demanded the government address the issue of the workers' right to minimum wages, discrimination against women, health insurance, and laws restricting the right to form trade unions and professional unions, non-implementation of the government to the relevant jurisprudence. In a related development, the field report prepared by researchers of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, has been completed and published, which revealed the relationship between Muslims and Copts over the past 10 years. The report said that the Archdiocese of Nag Hammadi had a prominent political role and the “high electoral participation of its Copts and the high political tensions associated with the participation and influence on the outcome of legislative elections.” The report asked about the relationship between attacks took place on January 6, and the electoral alliances or conflicts of influence in the constituency of Nag Hammadi, in preparation for legislative elections, set to begin in Autumn 2010. It questioned the details of a plan of securing the Coptic churches and communities in the areas of Nag Hammadi and Farshout during the New Year celebrations and Coptic Christmas and whether the security presence was sufficient in the light of events in the area since November 2009, until January 6, 2010 or not? “Did the security have a role in addressing and dealing with these attacks?” it asked. The Initiative recommended the need to initiate a “formal, thorough and independent investigation, either through the office of the Attorney General or by an independent panel of private committee that has legal authority, or both, to prove the fact that the actual liability or fault of attacks in January 2010, to include investigation of all the circumstances of these attacks, at least since the events of Farshout in November 2009, until February 10, 2010.” It stressed the need to bring those responsible for sectarian attacks in both, Nag Hammadi and Farshout, to criminal trial, and “pay a fair compensation to the affected people of those attacks as well as the need for the immediate release of all detainees, without rational reasons of both Muslims and Christians of the Nag Hammadi Center, and to hold those responsible for any arbitrary arrests or cases of illegal detention.” For its part, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) announced its report on Wednesday, which was sent to Nag Hammadi, and revealed that the incident of Farshut contributed to “stirring the situation in Upper Egypt and its manifestations took place in the events of Nag Hammadi, due to the intervention of some parties in the situation which led to the escalation and the breakout of sectarian incidents.” The organization said that there is a variety of reasons and factors behind the events of worsening sectarian strife in Egyptian society “such as the poor performance of government agencies at all levels in dealing with such crises by not making it public and hiding important information on the events.” It also said that the failure of religious institutions and the failure of both Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church in any action that would look into the causes that led to this crisis, “but they [have] just tried to soothe the situation without searching for radical and real solutions to these events in order to prevent its recurrence.” The researchers of the EOHR said at the end of the report that, “in order to avoid recurrence of such events again, there must be political will and conscious interaction in which all state institutions, particularly the Ministry of Awqaf, Al-Azhar and the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Information and the Interior Ministry with the cooperation of the Church, civil society and political parties to work to draw up plans for an urgent interim long-term strategy to save the country from the consequences of such events.” BM
