On May 8, Egypt’s Permanent Supreme Committee for Human Rights, a body established in 2018 by Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly, held a meeting with representatives of a number of state-aligned civil society groups to discuss an ambitious and equally dubious five-year national government strategy for human rights. The document, which was also reviewed the day after with the Committee for Human Rights of Egypt’s House of Representatives, will be the first of its kind and will serve as a guide for the government on how to improve human rights. It is set to go into effect by mid-2021.
“The five-year strategy is important [in order to] review and adopt a broader [approach to human rights], as they may develop over time,” parliament member Tarek Radwan, head of the House of Representatives’ Human Rights Committee, told Al-Monitor. “Human rights matters develop from time to time, and that is why it needs revision,” he added.
The government strategy, which should be ultimately approved by the prime minister, reflects the attempts of Egyptian authorities to adopt a broad and largely vague approach to human rights that, given its comprehensive aspiration, deliberately gives little weight to the specific abuses it is systematically accused of and which it usually downplays.
After more than a year on standby, the Permanent Supreme Committee for Human Rights began working at the beginning of 2020 following the country’s third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) prepared by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in November 2019. In this vein, in addition to drafting Egypt’s first government strategy for human rights, the committee is also in charge of preparing Egypt’s file for the next UPR, which will take place in 2024, following up on the implementation of the accepted recommendations of the previous one, and suggesting necessary solutions for its adoption. Egypt regards both processes as interrelated, and the national document for human rights will be based on four main pillars, including political and civil, social, cultural and economic rights.
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