Next week, UN climate talks, known as COP27, will begin in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. For many of the participants flocking to the resort, the venue of the talks is likely to be somewhat incidental to the negotiation and international relations taking place in the convention center’s sterile rooms. Egyptian activists facing brutal repression under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi are calling on visitors to the talks to burst the “COP bubble”: use the spectacle of foreign occasion and their relative freedom as foreigners to pressure the government to release at least some of its nearly 60,000 political prisoners.
“These prisons will have to be emptied,” said Yasmin Omar, an Egyptian human rights lawyer with the Justice Committee, who led the organization’s paintings at COP27. This was basically done through the COP27 Civic Space, a coalition of teams dealing with human rights. both in Egypt and in exile. In recent months, a petition has circulated calling for the release of political prisoners, highlighting express instances. “I hope that those attending the COP will bring those instances to the discussions and recognize that they are in lands that do not conform to human rights,” he said.
At the time of writing, 247 organizations had signed. After giving her support, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg went to London for a sit-in organized by Mona and Sanaa Seif, sisters of imprisoned human rights blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah. Software developer and political activist El Fattah has been on hunger strike for over two hundred days which they fear will last to death. On Monday, his circle of relatives announced that he had written them a letter saying he would stop drinking calories altogether, after subsisting on about a hundred calories a day. When COP27 begins on November 6, a water strike will also begin. But the call to release him and other political prisoners has sparked tense debates among visiting environmental groups, weighing their own access to talks, domestic political priorities and, in some cases, the protection of ground staff.
In interviews, foreign teams in Egypt have expressed reluctance to be more frank about the factor due to great caution for staff both in Egypt and in repressive regimes elsewhere, refusing to talk about the main points of the case. During the reporting of this story, several nevertheless signed the COP27 Civic Space petition.
Greenpeace International is one of the teams that has not. As The Guardian reported over the weekend, Greenpeace also opposed language calling for the release of political prisoners in a list of demands issued through the COP27 Coalition, an African-Arab-led coalition. organization of which Greenpeace was a member. The preamble to this list now refers to the fact that climate justice is “in societies that close civic space and fail to guarantee the human rights of all Americans and communities, especially those who protect those rights. “Greenpeace and several Egyptian NGOs have since left the coalition.
“I wouldn’t blame Greenpeace, but I would blame the authority that made the commitment to human rights in Egypt a danger to everyone. This is what the government intended to do,” Omar said last week, before tensions around the organization escalated. public. ” People are afraid to paint together. At another time, they would never refuse. Some of them, I know how much they refuse,” he said, referring to recent discussions within and among green organizations. concern is a truth in Egypt. ” The key to protecting those on the ground, Omar says, will be to remain in Egypt after the COP ends.
Greenpeace UK’s co-executive administrators issued a week calling for El Fattah’s release and called on the UK government to work to protect her. Greenpeace International declined a request for comment on the article, as did 3 other teams that did not point to the request: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Federation. But a spokesman for Greenpeace International told the Guardian: “We are very involved in the terrible human rights scenario in Egypt and believe that climate justice cannot be had. “without social justice. . . . Our works in Egypt represent a significant threat to the protection of the personnel who will continue to work there long after COP27 ends. It is our duty not only to consider their protection, but also to avoid expanding the threats facing the developing environmental movement in Egypt.
Greenpeace International’s stance has been criticized by Egyptian human rights defenders such as Sanaa Seif. “Greenpeace International’s position is disappointing and they deserve to know better,” he told the Guardian. Organizations have much more leeway and strength to speak out and make human rights a priority at the COP. “
Other teams have embraced those demands more openly. ” The struggle for civic space and for a meaningful and effective civil society in the UNFCCC processes has been and will be a precedent for this network,” said Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network International, founded in South Africa. The organization has a long-standing presence at COPs consisting of 1,300 teams from 130 countries, organized into regional nodes that are coordinated through a foreign secretariat. Some subsidiary teams had already signed the petition when we talked about this COP. CAN International nevertheless followed suit, after consultations with members in Africa and the Arab world.
In the call for counter-terrorism, Sisi’s government has used new and old laws, some dating back to the colonial era, to ban demonstrations and gatherings of more than five other people, giving security forces wide discretion to declare the gatherings illegal and forcibly disperse them. Prosecutors can inflict collective punishment on anyone present, without having to discover that others have broken a certain law before imprisoning them. More than a third of political prisoners still await trial in difficult situations. According to the Egyptian Human Rights Network, three other people died in the two-day area in September due to poor living conditions and medical negligence.
After the Egyptian revolution toppled leader Hosni Mubarak, there was a brief era of relative political freedom. In the small town of Edku, near Alexandria, citizens controlled to fend off BP’s plans to expand its fuel infrastructure, forcing the company to redirect an allocation of pipelines and processing plants with tactics that included a sit-in at the prospective structure site. The mood changed after Sisi forced his way in 2014, and the crackdown has intensified since then.
“People disappear, and there is a pseudo-legal cycle of incarceration, where they are detained in rate and in preventive detention. Once the legal limit of their detention ends, they are released on paper and re-arrested with a copy of the same police report,” he said.
“Arbitrary detention has an epidemic in Egypt,” Omar told me. “This is the worst era in Egypt’s fashion history. Even [former President Muhammad Anwar] Sadat and Mubarak only had those that can be directly linked to political or human teams. Rights teams. Now the arbitrary detention device works randomly.
Omar’s husband, a journalist, spent a year in prison after being attacked for his paintings. His call was eventually added to a case for his paintings as a human rights lawyer. The case included charges carrying the death penalty, so they made a decision. move to the United States and now live in Nevada. He worries that things could get even worse as Egypt grapples with the government’s disastrous economic policies, which combine austerity with large debt-financed megaprojects amid a cost-of-living crisis. the scenario becomes in terms of poverty and social security, more they worry about other people rebelling, and then they arrest more people,” Omar said. “I don’t think if there is any other revolution, it will be as nonviolent as what happened in the Arab Spring. “
While human rights defenders are among the most publicized victims of arbitrary detentions, activists of all kinds are under threat. Civil society teams cannot settle for foreign subsidies and conduct maximum activities, adding opinion polls, without a specific state permit. Human Rights Watch reported that the specific environmental teams have been under increased government scrutiny in the run-up to COP27, combined with a “recent expansion of official tolerance for environmental activities that are seamlessly reconciled with government priorities and not perceived as government criticism. “A dynamic that endangers anyone with ties to teams critical of government policies, the weather organizer told me: “This COP is going to end. They are all going to return to their country and Egyptians will be left to face the resistance of the government. “
The key to making sure that doesn’t happen, Omar said, is to build relationships that last beyond the duration of the conference. COP27 Civic Space stakeholders have established a formula for tracking imaginable government reprisals and offering legal assistance. our eyes off Egypt when we’re gone,” Essop said. “We don’t need to fall into a typical Northern NGO-type technique. We actually do it in a very delicate and considered way,” he continued, adding that CAN International “has not made public all the charts we have made” to mitigate the risks.
In the United States, which provides more military aid to Egypt than to any other country outside Israel, political reaction to Egypt’s abuses has been calm. on human rights abuses. In the end, $170 million was eventually disbursed, adding $75 million in approved conditional aid because the government had demonstrated “clear and stable progress in releasing political prisoners and ensuring due process for detainees. “
Much of this progress is a façade, Omar says. While between 200 and 400 prisoners were reportedly released between April and June this year, the Justice Committee has documented that 900 have been detained since the government announced its new human rights strategy. The state is only doing a cosmetic procedure to discharge the world’s satisfaction and silence” ahead of COP27, he said. “We call on the United States not to be fooled by these measures” and for Biden to raise considerations about political prisoners at next month’s meeting. convention and in any discussion with Sisi.
Members of Congress have questioned the U. S. military’s aid. He has been in the U. S. to Egypt in recent years, adding via the Egyptian Human Rights Caucus: “I am concerned, and I know many of my colleagues are concerned, that the Egyptian government is on track to improve the climate. “in public relations through COP27,” Congressman Jamaal Bowman told TNR, referring in particular to Alaa Abd El Fattah’s hunger strike. “We want to keep organizing to replace the calculation here; We want the regime to feel that in order to have a successful conference, it will have to release the prisoners. “
Germany has maintained close ties with Sisi’s government and helped negotiate a $9 billion deal between Egypt and German energy company Siemens for fuel and wind components. Egypt is also a major customer of German weapons and military equipment. , having acquired an estimated $850 million in 2020. La former Greenpeace foreign executive director, Jennifer Morgan, is now a foreign meteorological envoy for the German government. She co-chaired an assembly with Sisi in Berlin this summer, when he and Chancellor Olaf Sholz also discussed a fuel procurement deal.
According to some, the deep and lucrative ties between the Egyptian regime and Western governments give activists there a duty to pressure decision-makers in the country, according to some. and asset managers who finance fossil fuel infrastructure. “For me, the question is not so much whether civil society deserves to move to the COP,” said Nicolas Haeringer of 350. org, who is a signatory to the COP27 Civic Space petition, “but how those we will approve and those that we will not approve can put pressure on our own governments to make sure that they will hold the Egyptian regime accountable instead of signing agreements and loading fossil fuels. “
Residents of Sharm El Sheikh and surrounding spaces get a glimpse of what activists can expect at COP27. In recent weeks, they have faced police inspections on roads and public transport, interrogated about their political activities and forced to hand over their phones. . Those who do not have paintings allow entry, and even some who do, find it difficult to enter the city. Increasing militarization has made the city feel like “a war zone,” one resident told Middle East Eye. Reserved for the convention: You would have a National Security Agency agent assigned to the waiting room to monitor the comings and goings of guests. indicating that your non-public information, by adding passport numbers, may be used “for security reasons. “
While visitors are likely to face fewer threats than Egyptians, those visiting the convention are taking extra precautions related to virtual security and legal rights; The COP27 Safety Centre has compiled resources in seven languages on precautions to take when travelling and attending the convention. Over the weekend reports emerged that Indian weather activist Ajit Rajagopal had been arrested, along with the lawyer he had called for help, Makarious Lahzy. Both were released on Monday.
Protests are a common feature of COP demonstrations, where local activists tend to convene some sort of outdoor parallel area of the convention center for direct action discussions and planning. Events within the convention: organized through those who have badges to participate. – They are complemented by outdoor events. But given the repressive environment in Egypt, COP27 is expected to be much quieter than its predecessors.
“We went to the COP very aware of the demanding situations faced by civil society teams on the ground, and that’s why we drew inspiration from those teams in terms of how to engage more productively,” said Rachel Cleetus, EU policy director. of the Climate and Energy Program of Concerned Scientists, which signed the COP27 Civic Space petition. “We have raised considerations on safety and security issues in the run-up to the COP with the U. S. delegation.
When asked to recommend those arriving in Egypt in the coming days, the Egyptian weather organizer I spoke to said, “Don’t stay in the Sharm El Sheikh bubble,” which they called a “tourist fortress” surrounded by concrete walls. . . « This is the definition of a bubble. If they can get away with it, they should. And it is important that the atrocities committed during the regime come to light. over others and do not oppose others. This regime is a product of global injustice, adding climate injustice.
Kate Aronoff is one in The New Republic.