Rights groups: Egypt presidential poll not ‘free or fair’
Egyptian presidential elections expected to be dominated by President Abdel Fattah al-sisi next month will be “neither free nor fair”, more than a dozen human rights groups said Tuesday.
“The Egyptian government has trampled over even the minimum requirements for free and fair elections,” the 14 international and Egyptian organizations said in a joint statement released by Human Rights Watch.
“The government of President Abdel Fattah al-sisi has relentlessly stifled basic freedoms and arrested potential candidates and rounded up their supporters,” according to the groups, which also include the World Organization Against Torture and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.
All serious potential presidential contenders for the March 26-28 vote have either been jailed or have withdrawn from the presidential race, with some claiming the entire process was not conducive to free elections.
A coalition of eight parties and 150 public figures called on Egyptians last month to boycott the poll, calling it a “charade”.
Former army chief Sisi, who was elected in 2014 after leading the military ouster of president Mohamed Morsi, will face a single opponent: Mousa Mostafa Mousa, a Sisi supporter.
“Egypt’s allies should speak out publicly now to denounce these farcical elections, rather than continue with largely unquestioning support for a government presiding over the country’s worst human rights crisis in decades,” the rights groups said.
The United States as well as the European Union and individual European countries “should halt all security assistance that could be used in internal repression and focus aid on ensuring concrete improvements to protect basic rights,” they said.
“Seven years after Egypt’s 2011 uprising, the government has made a mockery of the basic rights for which protesters fought,” the groups added, referring to the protests that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
One former potential candidate in the election, ex-army chief of staff General Sami Anan, was accused of illegally announcing his intention to run for president before getting the military’s approval. Another, leftist human rights lawyer Khaled Ali, dropped out last month, citing harassment of his supporters and concerns over the safety of his volunteers.
In December, a military court sentenced a colonel, Ahmed Konsowa, to six years in jail after he announced his intention to stand. British aid organization Oxfam faced fresh pressure on Tuesday after a former senior member of staff said her concerns about “a culture of sexual abuse” involving aid workers in some of the organization’s offices had been ignored.
Helen Evans, who was in charge of investigating allegations against Oxfam staff members between 2012 and 2015, told Channel 4 television that abuse cases she had heard of included a woman who had been coerced to have sex in exchange for aid, Reuters reported.
Another involved an assault on a teenage volunteer by a staff member in a charity shop in Britain, she said.
A survey of Oxfam staff in three countries including South Sudan showed around 10 percent of staff had been sexually assaulted and others had witnessed or experienced rape or attempted rape by colleagues, Evans said. Evans, who headed a “safeguarding” section responsible for protecting staff and the people Oxfam works with, spoke of frustration that her calls for more support for her team were not taken seriously enough.
“I felt that our failure to adequately resource was putting people at risk,” she said in an interview broadcast by Channel 4 late on Monday. “I struggle to understand why they didn’t respond immediately to that call for additional resource.”
One of the best-known international NGOS, with aid programs running across the globe, Oxfam is under threat of losing its British government funding over the sexual misconduct allegations.
The deputy head of Oxfam resigned on Monday over what she said was the British charity’s failure to adequately respond to past allegations of sexual misconduct by some of its staff in Haiti and Chad.
The scandal is escalating into a broader crisis for Britain’s aid sector by bolstering critics in the ruling Conservative Party who have argued that the government should reduce spending on aid in favor of domestic priorities.
Aid Minister Penny Mordaunt threatened on Sunday to withdraw government funding from Oxfam unless it gave the full facts about events in Haiti.
After meeting Oxfam officials on Monday, Mordaunt said she had written to all British charities working overseas to demand that “they step up and do more, so that we have absolute assurance that the moral leadership, the systems, the culture and the transparency that are needed.”
Britain’s Charity Commission launched a statutory inquiry on Monday, saying it had concerns that Oxfam “may not have fully and frankly disclosed material details about the allegations at the time in 2011, its handling of the incidents since, and the impact that these have both had on public trust and confidence”.