Egypt's shrinking space for civil society
The Egyptian government crackdown on civil society organizations has intensified with the arrest of a prominent human rights lawyer.
Egyptian security forces arrested prominent human rights lawyer Azza Soliman at her home in Cairo on Dec. 7. An investigative judge interrogated Soliman, the founder of the Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance, a nonprofit that provides legal and social services to women, before she was released on bail of 20,000 Egyptian pounds (around $1,100).
According to Soliman's lawyer, Mahmoud Belal, Soliman was charged with "receiving foreign funding to harm the state’s interest; tax evasion; and establishment of an entity that conducts activities similar to those of a [nongovernmental organization]."
At least 12 civil society representatives are facing prosecution in Egypt's “NGO foreign-funding case” — as dubbed by the Egyptian media — on charges of receiving illegal foreign funding "to harm national security and sow chaos," and Soliman is the first of the 12 to be arrested. Like those prosecuted in similar cases before her, she has been banned from traveling, and all her assets, as well as those of her organization, have been frozen.
On Nov. 19, airport security prevented Soliman from boarding a flight to Jordan to participate in a human rights training session and was told that her name was on a travel ban list. “I was not shown any official documents supporting this claim, nor was I informed of the travel ban prior to my trip,” she told Al-Monitor. Soliman said that she had actually been a lawyer representing a defendant in the NGO foreign funding case before discovering she was one of the defendants herself. Later that same day, she learned that her assets had been frozen, a fate suffered by at least six other prominent rights defenders and three civil society organizations accused in the foreign-funding case.
