Tag: egypt

Activism Calendar (Updated… again)

MONDAY, JULY 3
Kefaya and socialists are meeting with labor activists to strategize for the August national labor union elections, 7pm, at the Center for Socialist Studies.
TUESDAY, JULY 4
Kefaya is holding a press conference, 12 noon, publicizing the findings of its report on Corruption in Egypt. The detailed report is the product of months of work by a group of the movement’s youth, academics and economists. The conference will be held at the Egyptian Center for Studies, building #15, 26th of July Street, behind Grand Hotel in Ramsis.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 5
The Press Syndicate’s Liberties’ Committee has called for a demonstration in front of the Arab League HQ, 12 noon, in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
FRIDAY, JULY 7
A group of bloggers have called for a demo in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, 3pm, following the Friday prayers, to protest the Israeli military operations in Gaza. The meeting point would be in front of Nahdet Masr’s statue. For more information click here.
SUNDAY, JULY 9
In protest of the new press law, expected to be endorsed by the NDP-controlled parliament, 12 opposition and independent newspapers are to suspend printing on Sunday. A national boycott of government-owned publications has been called for by the opposition. Journalists for Change have called for a demo in front of the Parliament at 11am.
MONDAY, JULY 10
A Memorial will be held for Egypt’s two “Communist Saints,” Ahmad Nabil el-Hilaly and Youssef Darwish, 7pm at the Press Syndicate.
FRIDAY, JULY 14
A memorial will be held for Ahmad 3abdallah Rozza, the 1970s legendary student activist, 7pm at the Press Syndicate.
TUESDAY, JULY 18
The Center for Socialist Studies is organizing a lecture, 7pm, titled, The Palestinian Divisions: New pressures on Hamas. Speakers include: Dr. Hassan Naf3a, Political Science prof at Cairo University, together with one of the center’s members.
THURSDAY, JULY 27
The Center for Socialist Studies is organizing a discussion on, The Ya3qoubian Building… An insight into Mubarak’s Egypt. Participants will include, Judge Noha el-Zeini, the novel’s author 3alaa el-Aswani, and Khaled el-Sawi, movie star and member of Artists for Change.

Solidarity demo for Gaza

Around 500 demonstrators gathered in front of the Press Syndicate today, to denounce the Israeli military operations in Gaza. The protestors, mostly nationalists and leftists, chanted against Israel’s assault on Gaza, the US support for Tel Aviv, and against the Egyptian Mukhabarrat whose agents are involved in mediations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

(UPDATE: See pictures of the demo by photographers Victoria Hazou and Nasser Nouri. You can also see one by Tara Todras-Whitehill after the jump.)
Continue reading Solidarity demo for Gaza

Egyptians in California charged with slavery

Unfortunately, this kind of treatment of domestic servants is all-too-common in Egypt and the region, particularly the Gulf. These sadists decided they could do it in California too:

Egyptian couple in California plead guilty to slavery charges

Fri Jun 30, 7:45 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – An Egyptian couple living in southern California have pleaded guilty to slavery charges involving a now-16 year old girl they forcibly kept working in their home for two years, according to US attorneys Friday.

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Abdelnasser Eid Youssef Ibrahim, 45 and his ex-wife, Amal Ahmed Ewis-abd Motelib, 43, are accused of harboring an illegal alien, obtaining labor by force, and conspiracy.

The girl worked as nanny and housekeeper for a family of seven up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

“She had to work all day long,” Assistant US Attorney Robert Keenan said. “They used unlawful forms of coercion such as hitting and slapping, and threats of arrest by the police if she ever went outside on her own.”

The girl began working for the couple as a domestic servant in Egypt in 1999, and the couple brought her into the United States in 2000 where her forced servitude continued for two years.

The couple kept the girl in an unfurnished, unventilated, and unlighted garage that building inspectors deemed “deplorable.”

The slaveholders, who pleaded guilty Thursday, are expected to be sentenced to three years in prison and required to pay the girl 101,516 dollars in restitution.


Ironically, they could have given her a decent place to live, decent salary and flight back home once a year for much, much less than that. One only wishes these types of people could face jail in Egypt!

3alaa asks for your help to free his friends

3alaa Seif, the leftist blogger who has recently come out of prison, is appealing to you to help release his friends Mohamed Sharqawi and Kareem el-Sha3er.
Please check out the appeal on Human Rights First website.
3alaa, and other leftists, have been also campaigning for the release of Muslim Brothers detainees.
Mr. El-Sa3id Ramadan, one of the editors of Ikhwan Web, sent me a list of the MB detainees who were mostly picked up during pro-democracy demos. The number of detainees had exceeded 900 since last March, but it has gone down to less than 600 detainees at the moment, according to Ramadan, as there has been some recent releases.
The list is in Arabic, and there are missing names (for some reason the file was corrupt), which Ramadan has promised to send in soon. We’ll be updating the list as we receive more names.
(If you are a Muslim Brother activist, and know more names, please contact the website administrator, and we’ll add the names you know.)

UPDATE: The full list of detainees could be found here.

Who will be the next pope?

Does anyone find it weird that Pope Shenouda III was scheduled to Germany this week for an emergency spinal cord operation — the exact same pretext that Mubarak went to Germany last summer for? The pope’s kidneys are also in bad shape, apparently, and he might be heading to the US for treatment.

Nahdet Misr’s leading article yesterday worries about his health and wonder who would replace him. Valid question — the Coptic pope has been in power for longer than Mubarak himself (since 1971) and has played an overtly political role in Egypt, breaking with long-standing tradition by, for instance, endorsing Mubarak for re-election last September. That controversy also exists within the church, with a monastic tendency that tends to eschew temporal power that has been increasingly at odds — and come under attack — from Shenouda, notably embodied by the followers of Father Matta Al Miskeen and the monks of the monastery of Makarious.

Needless to say, the election of a new pope should something happen to Shenouda would come at an interesting juncture in Egyptian politics, especially when Copts are increasingly disgruntled (and vocal) about the discrimination they endure.

My friend Paul Schemm wrote an excellent article about the roots of this split in the church in the Cairo Times (Volume 6, Issue 39) a few years ago, I might post it at some point when I get back to Egypt.

Released detainees debate reform on TV

As I’m blogging now, 3alaa is speaking on MBC, about the bloggers community in Egypt, human rights abuses, prospects for activism in Egypt, and his encounter with the Muslim Brothers youth in detention.
Two released detainees are also to appear on Dream2 TV, Saturday 8pm (Cairo time), together with two Mubrak’s National Democratic Party MPs.
Kefaya activists Ahmad Salah and Nada al-Qassas are to debate political reform against Yehya Wahdan, the former State Security Colonel who became the MP for Bab el-She3reya district (formerly represented by Dr. Ayman Nour), and Dr. Sherin 3abdel 3aziz, Al-Waylee’s district MP.
The talkshow host is Wael el-Ibrashi.
دي حتبقى مجزرة

Activism Calendar

TODAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 30 (CAIRO)
The Muslim Brothers have called for a demo following the Friday prayers at Al-Azhar, to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the kidnapping of 64 Palestinians–including 21 elected Palestinian members of parliament and eight cabinet ministers–by Israeli occupation troops.
SATURDAY, 1 JULY (CAIRO)
-The Press Syndicate’s Council has called for a demo in front of the Shura Council (Egypt’s Upper House), 12 noon, to protest the new press law the government is planning to pass, which the syndicate says does not include any of the reviews and amendments it requested (repeating the same scenario as the new judicial authority law).
-The national forces have called for a demo at the Press Syndicate, 7pm, in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, followed by a conference, featuring Nizar Rayan, member of Hamas’ politburo in the Occupied Territories, Fathi Hammad, Palestinian Legislative Council member, and Palestinian leftist writer Abdel Qader Yassin.
SUNDAY, JULY 2, (LONDON, UK)
A group of young Egyptian professionals and students living in the UK are coming together in attempt to find answers to a troubling question… Egypt’s Future: Bright or Bleak? Come and voice your opinion, 6 pm, Central London. If you’re interested in participating and for the venue address please contact Inas Ismail on: inas_ismail-at-yahoo-dot-com, or +447811166700
MONDAY, JULY 3 (CAIRO)
Kefaya and socialists are meeting with labor activists to strategize for the August national labor union elections, 7pm, at the Center for Socialist Studies.

Detailed critique of new judicial legislation

The Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Professional (lovingly known by its user-friendly acronym ACIJLP) has sent out its critique of Egypt’s new judicial authority law approved by parliament on Monday, saying that while an improvement in some respects it is still lacking in 12 ways. These criticisms echo what the Judge’s Club has been saying, i.e. that they are not satisfied and will continue their struggle for more independence. The question is of course in what way? There were talks of strikes previously, but it’s hard to imagine the judges going out into the streets again.

In other judicial news, a new president of the Cassation Court has been appointed to replace the pro-government Fathi Khalifa. His name is Mokbel Shaker, but I don’t know anything about him. (Baheyya?)

Update: A reader wrote in with some information on Shaker:

If you ask reformist judges and their supporters, they would certainly consider Muqbil Shakir a pro-regime figure. He’s not the most vicious, but for that reason they might see him as a bit more formidable. They would certainly view him as emblematic of the regime’s capture of the judiciary (and actually not just emblematic, but a critical figure on a very practical level as well). Of course, if you ask the pro-regime party in the judiciary–which used to dominate the Judges Club but got tossed out a few years ago–the reform party in the judiciary is not seeking reform at all but only al-Gazira TV cameras and Al-Misri al-Yom headlines.

Who is right? Well, I think that both sides have some of truth on their side. Base motives are certainly involved. But I think this is not just about egos. The core issue is whether the Egyptian regime is an enemy of judicial independence or a supporter of it. While I incline more toward the analysis of the reformers on this question, I have to admit that it is a more complicated issue than may first appear; it depends a lot on your time horizon and your vantage point for comparison. I should add that there are some tactical differences as well–whether it is best to pressure quietly or confront publicly.

Muqbil Shakir has been a key figure in this struggle–caught up in early efforts to press the regime hard back under Nasser and now a key figure in the more conciliatory approach. He was a young member of the Judges Club back in 1969 and was dismissed along with the other rebels at that time (in the infamous “massacre of the judiciary.”) Like most of the dismissed judges, Shakir was rehired in the Sadat years. I don’t know much about his career in the 1970s and 1980s, but he continued to be active in the Judges Club and was elected president of that body, I think in 1992. He served for much of the rest of the decade in that position, I think. He came to lead the faction in the Judges Club that was far more reluctant to confront the regime. Their basic attitude seemed to be that an overly confrontational policy would politicize the judiciary and that most of what they wanted could be achieved through quiet lobbying. And the Judges Club did get much better conditions for judges under his tenure. They do see the warts in the regime, but their point of comparison is past regimes and others in the region. And they point not only to better salaries but also to real improvements in judicial autonomy, mainly achieved in the 1980s.

The reformers see this approach as far too cozy. For them, the institutional concessions of the 1980s are hardly enough and the material concessions of the 1990s came at a price–the judges were bought off. And the most critical would see Shakir as a man who helped negotiate the terms of this deal.

(Note: the above was lengthened at the readers’ request.)

The ACIJLP release follows below. Judicial geeks only.

Continue reading Detailed critique of new judicial legislation