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Somewhere else, Egyptian human rights activist and software developer Alaa Abd el-Fattah may have attended the COP27 climate summit at Sharm el-Sheikh’s Red Sea hotel, which continues next week, coinciding with el-Fattah’s 41st birthday. , Egyptian security forces have jailed him several times over the past decade, following his role in the 2011 uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak. He has been on hunger strike for about six months and began refusing water on Sunday.
El-Fattah is now one of many unable to make their voices heard at the annual assembly of UN climate negotiators. While thousands of protesters flooded the COP26 demonstration in Glasgow, Scotland, last year, and other sites of high-level foreign assembly and protest activism, the Egyptian government imposed prohibitive restrictions on would-be demonstrators.
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Speaking out can be damaging in Egypt, where human rights teams view President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government as an authoritarian regime that has presided over widespread human rights abuses, adding mass arrests, killings of protesters by security forces and use of the military. Judgments opposed to civilians. His rule began in 2014 following a military coup that ousted democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood affiliate Mohamed Morsi. with fines and jail time, and protesters will have to register to get permission to hold a demonstration in a remote desert location separate from the conference.
“You can only protest in one COP domain, and you can only protest from 10 to 10 a. m. a 5 p. m. , and you must inform the government 36 hours in advance. It has to be climate-related,” said Hussein Baoumi, Amnesty International’s representative in Egypt. and Libya researcher.
“Egyptians will face retaliation given the history of mass surveillance,” he said of the protesters. “After the cameras are gone, they will be arrested. “
However, there were attempts to raise human rights issues at the conference. Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights, urged COP27 participants to wear white on Thursday in solidarity with political prisoners in Egypt and call for their release. Activists and human rights defenders promoted the action on social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #FreeThemAll.
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And on Tuesday night, at a noisy COP27-like event organized by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International at the German meteorological pavilion, el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, an activist jailed in the past for protesting a law banning unauthorized demonstrations, gave a moving speech, quoting his brother. “We want to reclaim the local action arena, not as an area to collect depressing profits, but as an area to talk about a better long term for everyone,” Seif said. “Hope here is a mandatory action Our rosy dreams probably wouldn’t come true, however, if we make our nightmares come true, we will die of worry before the floods come.
But an altercation following the event illustrated the resistance human rights activists face: According to a Washington Post report, Egyptian lawmaker Amr Darwish stood up and shouted at Seif, “You’re here summoning foreign countries to put pressure on Egypt. “she until UN security escorted him, the newspaper reported.
Activist organizations in Egypt face limited funding, harassment and onerous situations for organizing nonviolent protests and press conferences. Some worry about their lives and are necessarily forced into exile. A small meeting of an organization of other people is enough to generate suspicion. of the security forces, says Ubrei-Joe Maimoni Mariere, a Nigerian environmental activist with Friends of the Earth Africa, a nonprofit. government. Activists are careful not to break the country’s legislation,” he said. Instead of being in a charming place, he argues, such an assembly would be better held in a position where many other people live with the effects of climate change. , such as contaminated water and heat waves.
On Friday, US President Joe Biden will hold talks with el-Sisi and discuss human rights challenges in the country. Egypt has been the close best friend of the United States since the 1980s and is the main recipient of aid from the U. S. , Russia, France and Italian military. At Tuesday’s event, Seif necessarily called for that aid to be cut off. ” she said.
Bahgat, the Egyptian human rights defender, notes that the scenario for activists has worsened dramatically since the coup that forcibly brought el-Sisi, a former general, to justice. Ten years ago, after the Arab Spring culminated in the fall of former President Mubarak. , he says, other people felt stronger. His organization helped a network in western Egypt that, after being displaced by a nuclear power plant, staged a sit-in, not easy to be returned to their land or compensated. Finally, after this demonstration and a press conference, the government created a payment scheme. “I tell you this story because it is very unlikely that you will believe each and every facet today,” he says.
“The general repression that Human Rights Watch has witnessed also affects the surrounding teams, some very directly and others in more nuanced and sophisticated ways, in the sense that some of these teams and activists self-censor and have no interaction in certain movements and discussions. It can cause them problems,” says Katharina Rall, the group’s environmental researcher. The unwanted environment for protesters was already evident before the start of the COP27 summit, Rall says, when an Indian activist, Ajit Rajagopal, began an eight-day march from Cairo to Sharm el-Sheikh, but was arrested by Egyptian security forces on the 6th. November. He released the next day, however, the clear message.
The next UN climate summit, COP28, will be held in the United Arab Emirates in November 2023. This government is also well documented as a repressive regime. But a key message from COP27 has already emerged, Bahgat says: “There is no climate justice. “human rights.
Additional reporting via Gregory Barber.
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