Egypt freezes assets of leading rights campaigners

The request to freeze the human rights advocates’ assets was submitted in January by the investigative judge against the 13 NGO members and five NGOs targeted in the reopening of the 2011 “NGOs foreign funding” case.

The five campaigners were swept up in a wider case against at least 12 rights groups that dates back to 2011, but which was revived previous year.

The court also froze the organizational assets of CIHRS, HLMC and ECRE.

Saturday’s decision paves the way for criminal proceedings against the defendants, who have been accused of “pursuing acts harmful to national interests”. All CFDs (stocks, indexes, futures) and Forex prices are not provided by exchanges but rather by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual market price, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes.

Rights groups quickly denounced the decision, with Amnesty International calling it “a shameless ploy to silence human rights activism”. Until we’re completely banned from defending human rights, we will not give up our role and we will continue. They face life sentences of up to 25 years each if found guilty.

“Egyptian authorities are single-mindedly pushing for the elimination of the country’s most prominent independent human rights defenders”, Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch said.

The five included prominent activists Hossam Bahgat, the founder and former director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and Gamal Eid, the founder and director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information.

In 2011, Egypt provoked global condemnation when it raided Egyptian and Western NGOs in Cairo on suspicion of illegal financing, including the US National Democratic Institute and the worldwide Republican Institute. And reaffirms that he Egyptian opposition is too fractured to challenge President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s rule this year.

Egypt has been under fire for cracking down hard on rights groups, a claim denied by the Egyptian authorities.

“This is a blatant misuse of the criminal justice system to prevent people speaking out about the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in the country”.

NGOs have felt exposed since late 2011 when authorities raided 17 pro-democracy and rights groups, accusing them of joining a foreign conspiracy against Egypt.

Forty-three Egyptian and foreign NGO staff were subsequently placed on trial and handed jail terms up to five years in 2013 for working illegally. The evidence brought against them by security agencies is their human rights work.

None of the NGO staff summoned for questioning have been formally charged.