VI. Reports, Publications and Activities

35. The National Council for Human Rights, an official body subordinate to the Shura Council, issued its fifth annual report on 18 April 2009 on the state of human rights in Egypt during 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. The report carried the council’s recommendation for legislation to reinforce the values of citizenship and equal opportunity and ban discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, wealth or political affiliation.

Regarding freedom of religion and belief, the report discussed the Ministry of Interior’s refusal to implement two judicial rulings. The first is a ruling from the Court of Administrative Justice, issued 29 January 2008, which upholds Egyptian Baha’is right to obtain personal identification documents without being required to choose affiliation with one of the three recognized religions in Egypt—Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The second is a ruling from the Supreme Administrative Court, issued on 9 February 2008, which granted 12 Christian citizens the right to have their re-conversion to Christianity recognized in the slot for religious affiliation on personal identity documents, with the notation that they had previously converted to Islam.

The report also took note of a ruling from the Cairo Court of Administrative Justice, issued in April 2008, which suspended the Minister of Culture’s decision to grant the State Award for Achievement in the Arts to poet Helmy Salim and withdrew the prize from him because of a poem he wrote and published in Ibda’a Magazine, published by the Ministry of Culture, in late 2007 (see paragraph 1 of the Second Quarterly Report, 2008, and paragraph 1 of this report).

The report addressed several human rights issues, among them sectarian tensions. The council stated in the report that the year 2008 witnessed “an increasing number of incidents and clashes that were prompted by personal disputes, unfounded rumors or criminal acts that soon acquired a sectarian cast and had sectarian repercussions. This is not to deny that other clashes occurred that were linked to extreme attitudes on conversions or the right of Muslim men to marry Christian women, or the increased intervention of religious institutions—both official and unofficial—in economic, social and political arenas.” The report addressed four incidents that occurred in Minya, the most prominent being the attack on the Abu Fana Monastery, as well as other incidents in the governorates of Cairo, Alexandria, Fayyoum and Beni Soueif and the assault on the homes of Egyptian Baha’is in the governorate of Sohag in March 2009.

The report also remarked that “the delay and disregard for several necessary pieces of legislation and cultural and media policies needed to cement the principles of citizenship, has contributed to increased bigotry and factionalism.”

In the section on complaints made to the council, the report mentioned the complaints received by citizens of the Bahai faith about the difficulties they faced in obtaining personal identity documents. Regarding Muslims-Christian relations, complaints were lodged about the assaults on Copts in the district of Esna, located in the Qena governorate, in mid-December 2007; events at the Abu Fana Monastery in the Minya governorate in May 2008; events in the village of al-Nazla, located in Fayyoum, in June 2008; and an incident in Ain Shams, in the Cairo governorate, in November 2008.

36. Egypt sent a high-level official delegation led by Dr. Mufid Shebah, the State Minister for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, to the Durban II conference, held on 20-24 April 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland. The aim of the conference was to assess the progress made toward the objectives defined at the Durban I conference (the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance), held in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

The final resolution of the conference, drafted by a small group in which Egypt participated, condemned “the global rise and number of incidents of racial or religious intolerance and violence, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and anti-Arabism manifested in particular by the derogatory stereotyping and stigmatization of persons based on their religion or belief.” The document reaffirmed the right of minorities to protect their existence and cultural, religious and linguistic identity and stressed “that persons belonging to these minorities should be treated equally and enjoy human rights and fundamental freedoms without discrimination of any kind.” The statement also urged nations to eliminate barriers to minority political participation, including people belonging to religious minorities, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of their societies and urged “political parties to work towards fair representation of national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities within and at all levels of their party system.” The document called on states “not to resort to profiling founded on grounds of discrimination prohibited by international law, including on racial, ethnic or religious grounds and to prohibit it by law.”

In a press statement, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abu al-Gheit praised the concluding document’s condemnation of discrimination against Muslims and Arabs.

On the sidelines of Durban II, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva organized a panel on 22 April on the issue of incitement to religious and racial hatred and its relationship to freedom of expression. The director of the EIPR made a presentation representing civil society during the seminar, which was inaugurated by Navanethem Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Other presentations were made by Asma Jahangir, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief; Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression; Githu Muigai, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance ; Abdelfattah Amor, a member of the UN Human Rights Committee; and Patrick Thornberry, a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The EIPR also discussed the situation of religious minorities in Egypt in another panel held on the sidelines of the conference, organized by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies and Human Rights Watch on 24 April. The panel also discussed the situation of religious minorities in Iran and discrimination against Muslims in Europe.

On 23 April, on the sidelines of Durban II, the London-based group Article 19, which works on issues of freedom of freedom of expression, organized a panel to release the Camden Principles on Freedom of Expression and Equality, which were drafted over the span of five months by a team of 15 experts formed by Article 19, among them the director of the EIPR. The statement aims to suggest ways of reinforcing the right to equality and protection from discrimination while guaranteeing respect for freedom of opinion and expression.

The National Council for Human Rights and the Arab Organization for Human Rights held an Arab preparatory meeting on Durban II in Cairo on 28 and 29 March 2009 to draft a shared vision between national institutions and Arab civil society organizations for the Durban II conference in April 2009.

37. Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination, a group of volunteer activists committed to promoting religious tolerance, organized their second national conference against religious discrimination on 24-25 April 2009, titled “Education and Citizenship,” which focused on different aspects of religious discrimination in education in Egypt. Throughout its several sessions, the conference addressed the problem of religious discrimination in education and ways of combating it, which included the importance of education to the principle of equal citizenship, aspects of religious discrimination in various phases of education, ways of addressing ongoing forms of sectarianism and discrimination that compromise the principle of citizenship and how to create an enlightened national education system that helps realize this principle. 

The conference produced several recommendations, among them demands to prepare educators through training sessions and panels on human rights and international standards; a suggestion to incorporate al-Azhar academies into the civil education system under the supervision of the Ministry of Education and make al-Azhar University once again an institution for Islamic religious studies, open to those who wish to pursue education after their university degrees; a demand to reinforce the state’s power to impose the law on educational systems to ensure educational quality in practice; a recommendation to review all school curricula to purge it of material that deepens divisions and sectarianism; and a proposal to benefit from the experiences of developed countries to eliminate religious discrimination in schools and universities. The conference also recommended changing the official and society's view of education to make it a necessity for society and increasing the education budget. Finally, the conference recommended “amending part 2 of Article 6 of Education Law 139/1983, which provides for monetary prizes in contests to memorize the Qur’an at all educational levels, in order to make it compatible with the conditions of true citizenship.”

38. On 1 May 2009, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an official body of independent experts appointed by the US President and congressional leaders, released its annual report, which contained a section on Egypt. This report continued to categorize Egypt as one of 11 countries on the watch list. The commission welcomed the judicial ruling in favor of Egyptian Baha’is issued in January 2008 by the Cairo Administrative Court of Justice, which permits Baha’is to place a dash (—) in the slot for religious affiliation on identity documents or leave the space blank.  The commission welcomed the Supreme Administrative Court’s rejection of all final appeals of the ruling in March 2009 and the Minister of Interior’s decree of April 2009 allowing any Egyptian who belongs to a religious faith (other than those recognized by the state) and who hold identity documents proving their or their ancestors' religious affiliation, to place a dash (—) in the slot for religious affiliation on all official identification documents. The commission also praised a ruling from the Alexandria Court of Administrative Justice upholding the right of a citizen to obtain a personal identity card that notes his return to Christianity after a previous conversion to Islam. The report addressed a ruling from the Supreme Administrative Court in February 2008 allowing 12 Christians who had converted to Islam to document their re-conversion to Christianity while noting their former conversion to Islam. The report also noted that the Cairo Court of Administrative Justice had referred other cases of Christian “re-converts” to the Supreme Constitutional Court in March 2008.

The report discussed the arrest of blogger Rida Abd al-Rahman for his Qur’anist beliefs in October 2008, as well as the sectarian attacks on Copts in Ain Shams in Cairo in November 2008 and in Abu Fana Monastery in January and May 2008, and assaults on Baha’is in Sohag in March 2009. The report concluded with several recommendations, which it called on the US government to urge the Egyptian government to adopt. The report also recommended that the US State Department prepare a report every six months on the Egyptian government’s progress on issues addressed by the report.