The Egyptian Commission for Human Rights and Freedom (CEDHL) published a report on Tuesday denouncing the violation of different rights, among them the espionage of some participants, during the development of the COP27 climate summit which hosted the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheikh between November 6 and 19.
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“Cases of spying on the participants of the summit, registration of mobile phones, monitoring of the demonstrations and activists” are the main cases of violations included in the document published in Arabic and English on the website of this Egyptian NGO.
The first point of the report criticizes “a strong Egyptian security presence in the Blue Zone”, despite the fact that the United Nations was solely responsible for the security device in this area.
“Security surrounded the groups and took photos of the people on the phone,” in addition “I was also present in the rooms and during the intervention of Sanaa Seif (sister of the imprisoned activist Alaa Abdelfatah) they recorded everyone present”, indicates the report, which defines these events as a “violation of international law and the Egyptian Constitution.”
Official photo of COP27.
According to the Commission, another crime committed by the Egyptian authorities during COP27 was the violation of the right to private life after learning of cases of recording private conversations between different groups of activists.
“One of the incidents that took place during the conference was that a deputy filmed private conversations of an activist on his mobile phone while he was having these conversations with a group of activists to organize a solidarity event,” the text describes.
Likewise, it warns of the violation of the right to personal liberty and gives an example of the case of a Belgian deputy who “she was held by Egyptian security and her passport was photographed because she had badges with images of Egyptian detainees“; furthermore “he was asked to hand over his bag”.
To all this, add the strict conditions imposed by the Egyptian authorities to allow the development of demonstrations and concentrations in the Green Zone, aimed at discouraging them and thus limit freedom of expression, as well as the exhaustive control of security in these events.
For all these reasons, the CEDHL believes that “these violations are only a small sample of the human rights situation in Egypt” despite “the attempts by the Egyptian authorities to exploit the summit to improve their image of human rights in the country vis-a-vis the international community”.
From this entity they ask the Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into these events at the same time that they demand that the Egyptian authorities guarantee the participation of civil society in any type of event to take concrete steps to improve human and social rights in the country.
The Commission recalls that since 2014, Egypt has demonstrated “severe restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and opinion and assembly” through “numerous legal barriers” that have resulted in “unfair sentences against activists.”
EFE
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