The Egyptian government went before the United Nations Human Rights Council last month and insisted that there is no torture and that State of Emergency provisions are used only against terrorists.

Tell that to Dr. Taha Abdel Tawab.

The doctor, a well-known supporter of former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, was allegedly taken to a state security office and tortured for his support for ElBaradi, who is frequently named as a potential opposition presidential candidate.  According to the Arab human rights organization ANHRI, Tawab was transferred to Senorus hospital in serious condition.

ANHRI has asked government officials to investigate the incident but say they have not received a response.  Egypt has a long history of failing to provide public, independent investigations of security officers accused of torture.

The incident comes just days after Amnesty International called upon the Egyptian government to implement UN recommendations that would end torture and other abuses done in the name of security.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights’ findings, made public on March 9, criticized abuses made in the name of national security in Egypt.  The report criticized the wide discretion allowed to the SSI and commented that “SSI officers in practice enjoy carte blanche in deciding on whom to arrest”.

The Egyptian government claims emergency powers are used only against terrorists, but novelist Musaad Abu Fagr has been in administrative detention since February 2008, despite obtaining several court orders for his release.

Currently, it remains unclear how many people are held without charge or trial in administrative detention under the Emergency Law by order of the Minister of Interior, as the authorities refuse to disclose this information, but they may number several thousand. Some have been held continuously for years under a succession of detention orders despite obtaining court orders for their release.

The Egyptian government immediately demurred, stating that Emergency Law, which has been in effect for nearly three decades, is used primarily to combat terrorism and drug trafficking although, in fact, it is also used to detain bloggers and other peaceful critics, such as Dr. Taha Abdel Tawab.

The Egyptian claim is nonsense.  Emergency powers have long been used to prosecute political opponents, journalists, secularists, intellectuals, Islamists, women, religious minorities, gays and just about any group outside of the control of the regime.

Change is coming to Egypt.  The actions the government takes now will help guide what direction that change takes.  The best thing for the Mubarak regime to do is to read the UN Special Rapporteur’s report and end arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention with out trial, torture and ill-treatment by security officials and unfair trials before emergency and military courts.

Update: Encouraging news should be announced as well.  Amnesty International welcomes the release March 9 of blogger Ahmed Mostafa, although the release was conditional on an apology and removal of his accusation of nepotism against a military official. He was facing a military trial.

It’s been nearly four full months since the United Nations called upon both Israel and Palestinians to conduct independent and impartial investigations into alleged violations of international humanitarian law during the 2008-09 conflict in Gaza and Southern Israel.  These violations were reported upon in the so-called Goldstone Report. Amnesty International and the rest of the international community are still waiting for the two parties to give an adequate response.

Today (Feb. 26), the United Nations voted 98-7 with 56 countries absent to provide an additional five months for the parties to conduct these investigations.  To date, both Israel and Hamas have issued reports that fall woefully short of being effective and independent. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in his response to the reports, found little to praise in them but unfortunately fell short of an assessment of whether they met the criteria set by the UN.

This disappointment gets to the crux of the matter.  There are powerful efforts to ensure that the Goldstone Report doesn’t get acted on.  Amnesty International believes the report is a means toward justice in a conflict in which the evidence suggests war crimes were committed.  And more importantly, in its insistence that all sides to the conflict be judged by a single international standard, it also provides a way toward a long-term sustainable peace in a region that hasn’t had it for nearly 75 years.

Today’s UN resolution contains the elements that AI is calling for, although AI had lobbied for the text to be more explicit in terms of the assessment required from the Secretary-General at the end of the five months.

But if the UN allows both parties to dither and shirk their international responsibilities, the vote will be meaningless.  It’s particularly disappointing that the United States was one of the seven negative votes today.  US support for the Goldstone report and process is essential to its effectiveness.

We want the United States and all members of the UN to support this resolution and provide some strength to a process that offers promise but which can easily be derailed.  The goal must be to have Israel and Palestine conduct credible and thorough investigations that are monitored by a UN-mandated body of legal experts.  And in five months down the road, if the parties have not done so, the UN Security Council should refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.  That would be an act with teeth.

Today begins a monumental week for human rights in Israel and the Palestine National Authority on several fronts.

Over the course of the next few days, in Israel, legislators will begin debate a draft of a law that would put asylum-seekers and migrants at risk for being returned to countries where they would face serious human rights violations. The United Nations will receive the secretary-general’s report on Israeli and Palestinian domestic investigations into violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) from December 2008 to January 2009. And in the United States, a congressional letter is circulating asking Representatives to press for immediate relief of the citizens of Gaza.

That’s a lot of activity, and at a time of significant international interest in the region, Amnesty International hopes that it will lead to a renewed focus on human rights issues as the best way to achieve a lasting peace.

To take the various actions of the week one at a time:

* The Israeli Knesset will begin discussion Feb. 3 on the Prevention of Infiltration Law.  The legislation comes out of a current crisis, particularly on the Egyptian border, where refugees from human rights violations – primarily the Sudan and Eritrea – are attempting to reach safety by entering Israel in large numbers. In recent years, large numbers have been forcibly returned to Egypt, where they are at risk of both human rights violations and of being forcibly returned to their country of origin.

Amnesty International is concerned that the draft legislation prescribes lengthy prison sentences for asylum-seekers and irregular migrants and would allow for their immediate deportation, without regard to the risk they might face of torture or other ill-treatment or persecution in the country to which they would be forcibly returned.  We believe the legislation is inconsistent with international human rights treaties and we call about the Knesset to reject the draft law and ensure that any immigration or national security provisions that are introduced into law fully respect Israel’s international human rights obligations.  Click here for more information.

* This past November, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the findings of the Goldstone Report, which concluded that both Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups had committed grave violations of international law, including war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, during the three week conflict in Gaza and southern Israel.  Both groups were required to conduct domestic investigations into the allegations and submit reports back to the United Nations in early February.

Amnesty International has called upon both Israel and Hamas to fulfill their obligations in these investigations.  We attempted to ensure both sides conducted their investigations with the required independence, impartiality, transparency and effectiveness. If the reports fail on these accounts, Amnesty expects that the United States and other UN member states will fulfill their responsibility to monitor the investigations.

Feb. 2 update: Amnesty has just issued this release condemning the Israeli response to the Gaza investigations.

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That’s some bad timing U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey had last week.  Speaking at a public conference in Egypt, Scobey declared that “Egyptians are very free to speak out. The press debates so many things.” She then implied human rights organizations are free to investigate human rights abuses.

Activists call for the release of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Karim Amer

It didn’t take long for the Egyptian government to undercut the ambassador’s comments.  Today, Egyptian human rights activists announced their support for one of their own, blogger Hani Nazeer Aziz, when the government refused to implement for the fourth time a court order demanding his release from jail.  Aziz has been detained without charge at Borg AlArab prison since October 2008, activists say because the government wanted to silence his pro-democracy writings.

Scobey didn’t mention Aziz in her conference.  Nor did she mention arrested blogger Karim Amer, who is an Amnesty prisoner of conscience; nor did she cite a former POC Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a journalist and blogger detained for more than a month in 2007 for denouncing torture ; nor did she mention novelist Musaad Suliman Hassan Hussein, known by his pen name Musaad Abu Fagr, who is a subject this month of Amnesty International’s Write-a-Thon.  Earlier this month, one of the most famous bloggers in Egypt, Wael Abbas, was convicted in absentia to 6 months in jail on charges of sabotage.

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This posting is part of our Write-a-Thon Cases Series. For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/writeathon/

© AI Musaad Abu Fagr

A State of Emergency has existed in Egypt since 1981 following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, but these days the greatest emergency in Egypt is the state of civil society.  Writers, scholars, intellectuals, political opponents and a range of non-governmental organizations are all under attack by the government.

But novelist Musaad Suliman Hassan Hussein, known by his pen name Musaad Abu Fagr, refuses to be muzzled. His courage in face of government oppression offers American activists an answer as to how to promote human rights in the Middle East at a time of declining American influence.

Musaad Abu Fagr was arrested in December 2007 following demonstrations in Sinai against government plans to demolish thousands of homes near the border with the Gaza Strip. A movement founded by Musaad Abu Fagr and other political activists in Sinai, Wedna Na’ish (We Want to Live), led the demonstrations. He was accused of “inciting others to protest,” “resisting the authorities,” and “assaulting public officers during the exercise of their duties.” During the July and December 2007 demonstrations, several thousand protesters clashed with the security forces.

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Why should we care about the human rights of people who themselves don’t appear to respect them?  Statements made this week by a former member of an armed Islamic group suggest that it is the best way to change hearts and minds.

In an interview in the British newspaper the Independent, Maajid Nawaz, discusses his life in a radical Islamic group.  He was imprisoned and tortured in Egypt.  But it was in prison, he told British journalist Johann Hari, where he had his deepest beliefs challenged.

“When his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case. “I was just amazed,” Maajid told Hari. “We’d always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt — maybe these democratic values aren’t always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously … it was the beginning of my serious doubts.”

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Italy convicts Americans for C.I.A. renditions. BRENNAN LINSLEY/AFP/Getty Images

American courts and politicians have been reluctant to take a stand against the use of kidnapping and torture by American officials in the war on terror, but critics of those policies today received a stunning vote of support from an unexpected source – the Italian courts.

An Italian judge convicted a CIA station chief and 22 other Americans in the kidnapping of the 2003 Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan.  The cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, was seized and rendered to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured and held in detention without trial before his release nearly four years later. Abu Omar said he was tortured while held in secret detention in Egypt and that methods included alternating extremes of temperature and electric shocks to the genitals. There was no indication that the allegations were the subject of any investigation by the Egyptian authorities.

Supporters of American renditions insist that the policy is limited to actions against the most dangerous of the dangerous, but in fact the American kidnapping thwarted an Italian investigation into the cleric that might have resulted in criminal charges and a fair trial.  The fact that the Egyptians released the cleric after four years, despite that countries record of long-term administrative detention, simply underscores just how much of a loser the American policy is.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran

Today, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, spoke to the crowd at the weekly Friday Prayer and made what many have interpreted as a warning to those opposing the contested election results to cease their public protests or else face possible severe reprisals. The reprisals in question have been viewed as thinly veiled references to violence by government agents and Basij, or paramilitaries. The Supreme Leader said that opposition leaders would be held responsible for any bloodshed that resulted from the banned opposition rallies.

Although the protests in the streets in the first few days after the elections were met with attacks by baton-wielding riot police on motorcycles, and on Monday by deadly indiscriminate shooting into the crowd that left up to seven people fatally wounded and many more injured, the massive street protests since Monday have been largely peaceful, although random violence carried out by vigilantes and Basij have been reported.

Human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani is one of the activists who have been arrested in the aftermath of election protests in Iran.

The Iranian authorities have conducted their severest repressive measures in the form of mass detentions of journalists, students, opposition politicians and human rights activists. Among those arrested are human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani, a close associate of Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and a member of the Center for Human Rights Defenders.

However it has been an open question to what extent the Iranian authorities would be willing to unleash the full force of its military and riot police against the vast numbers of protesters in the streets. The potential for such use of violence to result in large-scale bloodshed is alarming.

Amnesty International has expressed concern that an opposition rally that is said to be planned for tomorrow may be met with the use of excessive violence. We urge the authorities to respect the right of the Iranian people to engage in the peaceful exercise of their rights to freedom of expression and association.

Written by Elise Auerbach, AIUSA Iranian country specialist

In the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s speech today in Cairo, the heavy web traffic of discussion among Arab activists was divided essentially into two camps.  One person claimed that the speech could have been given by George W. Bush.  Another compared it to Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem.

It’s not that either opinion is wrong – either may be proved right – but it was the nature of this talk from the very beginning that its meaning won’t be known for years down the road.  For what will make it historic (or not) is not the rhetoric of the speech but the policies that follow it (or don’t).

For one, I don’t believe this was a talk that George W. could have given, although it did share much of the same language on democracy that Bush stubbornly adhered to long after his own policies made shreds of any hope for it.

Midway through Obama’s speech, he digressed to condemn the belief in “a world order that elevates one nation or group of people.”  That is something that the worldview of American exceptionalism held by Bush and many of his presidential predecessors would never agree to.  I hope that this radically different worldview may result in a new path of policies.

And it was promising that Obama addressed a broad range of issues – democracy, women’s rights, Israel and Palestine and economic development – with an understanding that they all affect the human rights situation and all have to be addressed.

One thing that stood out was when it came to economic development, Obama announced a long line of initiatives that hold promise.  But in each of the other areas, particularly on Israel and on democracy, the rhetoric wasn’t matched by specifics.  I hope that doesn’t imply that he thinks that action on economic development is more important than in the other areas.

Amnesty International welcomes Obama’s comments, but we now expect him to follow up with policies to match the rhetoric.  He should begin with ending all practices that make the U.S. complicit in the various abuses that he denounced, such as extraordinary renditions and secret detention.  He should insist that Israel and the PNA to cooperate with the UN’s fact-finding mission looking into violations of international law during the recent Gaza war.  And he provide a public and independent report of America’s war on terror practices, a step he has opposed to date.

These would be just a first step, but an important step.  It would start us on a path that could turn his speech today from a remarkable moment into an historic event.

One of the side effects of our new social networking technology is we are getting to see human rights violations and the workings of security agencies occur in real time through tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.  I’ve known that for some time, but the knowledge feels different when it’s someone you have met who is affected.

Laila el-Haddad is a Duke graduate and Gaza activist.  She lives most of the time in Gaza but has returned to Duke on several occasions to talk about the Middle East.  She was passing through Cairo’s airport today on way to another venue when suddenly she and her family members were detained.

el-Haddad immediately started Twittering her detention.  If you have a Twitter account, you can follow her postings at @gazamom.  For more than 12 hours she described the unreal procession of questionings, of waiting, of discussions with the other detainees.  The most recent word she gives is authorities are denying her return to Gaza but will deport her to the U.S.

But not just a window into the detention, Twitter was also a means by which other activists could come to her assistance.  Friends at Duke immediately got in touch; American and Egyptian authorities were pressed for more information.  It seems unlikely that in this case she was saved from actual arrest, but Twitter has been credited in gaining releases in other cases.

Beyond the Twitter aspect, the detention also casts light on the hypocracy of many Arab governments’ support for Palestinian activists. The government’s support for Palestine often goes only as far as it serves their own purposes; when activists make the cause their own independently, it often — as it did in Laila’s case — brings the weight of the security forces on them.

More on Twitter: Activists in Moldova are attempting to see what a revolution would look like on Twitter.  Click here for the story.

(Thursday update and More on Twitter: Today, Egyptian police broke into the house of blogger Wael Abbas.  His reports are available on Twitter at @waelabbas.)