In a press statement issued on Tuesday, Amnesty International called on Egypt to lift the travel bans it recently imposed on human rights lawyers Nasser Amin and Hoda Abdelwahab.
The travel bans are linked to the controversial and protracted Case 713/2011 (commonly known as the “Foreign Funding Case”), in which a number of NGOs and individuals were investigated for allegedly receiving foreign funding. During the course of this case, numerous NGOs were suspended, many individuals arrested, travel bans imposed on them and their assets frozen.
One of the NGOs implicated in Case 713 was the Arab Center for Independent Judicial and Legal Professionals (ACIJLP), led by Amin and Abdel-Wahab, which resulted in them being subject to travel bans.
The case was recently concluded on March 20, 2024, but travel bans against Amin, Abdelwahab and others remain in place.
Egypt has come under international criticism for its poor treatment of NGOs and activists. For example, in 2016 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued statements condemning the “arbitrary and abusive” travel bans imposed on activists. In 2018, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Egypt’s “repression of civil society organizations, human rights defenders, peace activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, labor rights defenders, and trade unionists, including the arrest and disappearance of some of them, and the increasing use of counterterrorism and emergency laws.” In 2021, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) published a nine-point critique of Egypt’s Law No. 49 of 2019 on the Regulation of the Exercise of Civil Labor, opposing the law’s further restrictions on the scope of civil labor freedoms.
