Human rights groups attack new counter-terrorism legislation
The Islamic State took responsibility Thursday for a car bomb outside a government building in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, injuring a number of police officers and highlighting the country’s ongoing security problems. The attack comes less than a week after President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi passed new counter terrorism legislation which has been widely denounced by human rights organizations as counterproductive.
The Province of Sinai, the official Islamic State (ISIS) branch in Egypt, claimed responsibility for the attack, which injured at least 29 people at the time of writing.
The explosion is one of a series of attacks in Cairo this year, much of which has been attributed to jihadist terrorists. In the east of the country, in the Sinai Peninsula, a violent insurgency is being fought between government forces and the Province of Sinai. The conflict has cost hundreds of lives of both gunmen and Egyptian police, and has begun to increasingly spill over into greater Egypt and Cairo, most notably with a June attack in the capital which killed Hisham Barakat, the country’s chief public prosecutor and an ally of President Sisi.
The government enacted new counterterrorism laws this month as a response to Barakat’s assassination. At a speech at the prosecutor’s funeral President Sisi said, “The prompt hand of justice is tied by the laws, and we can’t wait for that.”
But the passing of draconian legislation is unlikely to aid the government in its efforts to curtail insurgents, Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch’s Deputy Director for its Middle East and North Africa Division, told The Media Line. “No one is denying that there is an ongoing serious insurgency… (but) Egypt already has a lot of laws,” Houry said, arguing that the legislation was aimed at the wrong people. The new law “brings in all sort of new layers of potential repression: it allows courts to ban journalists from practicing their profession and has a very vague definition for facilitating terrorism,” Houry suggested.
Human Rights Watch’s concern is that under the country’s new law anybody found guilty of aiding a terrorist can receive the same punishment as the perpetrator of an attack, even if the crime was never carried out. Under such a system it is possible that non-violent crimes and acts of civil disobedience could be categorized and punished as terrorist acts.
The law also makes it illegal for journalists to contradict official government information in publications regarding terrorist attacks, Houry argued. Journalists who do so can be heavily fined, something that will lead to a “chilling effect” on Egyptian journalism and will heighten the already existing self-censorship within the country, he added. Previously the government had planned to jail reporters who disputed the government’s narrative, but under pressure from the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate the Sisi administration lessened the punishment to a fine.
So severe is the threat to journalists from the Egyptian government that it is hard to overstate it, Vanessa Tucker, head of analysis at Freedom House, a US based group which describes itself as “an independent watchdog organization,” told The Media Line. Essentially the new counter-terrorism law is aimed, not at dealing with terrorism, but at controlling how people talk about it, Tucker said.
Sisi has based his rule on an agreement with Egyptians – they give him total control and he gives them stability and security, Tucker explained. But the insurgency in the Sinai is undermining this. If Sisi cannot maintain stability his legitimacy is undermined. Unable to deal with the insurgency the government is simply taking control of the discussion, Tucker said. “It’s not about fighting terrorism more effectively in the Sinai – it’s about controlling the narrative in the rest of Egypt… controlling even more strictly the way that people can talk about the government,” she summarized.
This represents a step backwards for Egyptian citizens who had more freedoms under Hosni Mubarak, Tucker suggested. Although the former president ruled the country under a state of emergency for thirty years, there were at least some checks on the government’s powers during his reign, the analyst said. This is not the case with Sisi, who has removed the independence of the judiciary, quashed independent journalism and curtailed Egypt’s previously well-developed media sector, Tucker concluded.
Nadim Houry, of Human Rights Watch, was equally pessimistic regarding the direction Sisi is taking the country in.
“Egypt is going through one of its darkest hours when it comes to repression and freedom of expression – look at the number of journalists detained, the number of NGOs that have closed down and left Egypt and the number of deaths that have occurred in (police) custody,” he said.