MIDDLE EAST (Washington Insider Magazine) – The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has announced its closing in a statement on its website as of January 10, 2022, citing increasing harassment and repression of human rights organizations in Egypt.
Founded in 2004 by attorney and human rights proponent Gamal Eid, the ANHRI organization was focused on maintaining freedom of expression and the preservation of other individual rights across the Middle East and North Africa. It collected articles and information from close to 140 human rights organizations and published them in a daily format on their website.
The organization worked on behalf of people who had been detained on political grounds. It advocated against censorship by Arab governments across the Middle East. ANHRI is respected by other human rights organizations across the region, and has long been considered a reliable and accurate source of information.
The harassment and abuses by the Egyptian government go back as far as 2013, when the headquarters of ANHRI were raided. Documents, furniture and equipment were confiscated and to date have not been returned to the organization. In 2015, the Wasla newspaper which had been published by ANHRI since 2010, was shut down and not allowed to operate. Mr. Eid, the founder and executive director, has not been allowed to travel since 2016, at which time his assets were frozen. Both the travel ban and asset seizure remain in effect to the present. At that time the court also froze the assets of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, and the Egyptian Right to Education Center, along with the Directors of each of those organizations.
In other examples of harassment, employees of ANHRI have been physically assaulted and threatened with arrest unless they cooperated with the government and became informants against the organization. Eid himself claims to have been beaten by government agents and threatened with guns before being covered in red paint, and warned to stop his efforts to support human rights victims.
Since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013, civil rights in Egypt have become more and more restrictive. That same year an Egyptian court forced the closure of several foreign pro-democracy organizations, one of which was U.S. based Freedom House. Jail sentences were ordered for 43 staff members, 15 of whom were Americans who had fled the country.
The El-Sisi government has been working to silence any dissenters or criticisms of his policies. A law which was passed in late 2019 severely restricts the work of human rights groups, and keeps close governmental surveillance on them. It also requires that such groups, including ANHRI, to register with the government Ministry of Social Solidarity, and obtain its permission before engaging in most of its formerly independent activities. ANHRI was also informed it would be necessary to change its name in order to register under the new rules.
In a statement from the ANHRI website regarding their decision to cease operations, the ANHRI team closed with the following:
“Out of concern for the safety and freedom of the team, and due to our inability to deal with such brutal police violations, we decided to suspend our work as an organization, and continue as individual lawyers, to defend human rights and the right of Egyptians to a state of the rule of law.”