While security crackdowns on Islamist suspects have become almost routine over the past few years, the Egyptian government has started to move against the country’s radical left. During the first week of August, the High State Security prosecutor charged five alleged leftists of “forming an illegal organization, the Revolutionary Socialists, … that calls for the overthrow of the regime and its replacement by another based on extremist communism”. The first defendant, Ashraf Ibrahim, a 35-year-old engineer and an antiwar campaigner, was also accused of contacting human rights groups abroad and “decimating false news that tarnishes the [Egyptian] state’s image”.

Other defendants, who are currently on the run, include: Nasser Farouq Al Beheiri, a human rights researcher with the Land Center; Yehia Fekri, an anti-globalization activist; Mustafa Bassyouni, a labor activist from Helwan who was arrested in the past at least twice by the secret police and claims to have been tortured; and Remon Edward, a student activist.

State Security police had detained Ashraf Ibrahim on April 19, two days after agents raided his apartment and confiscated his computer and other electronic equipment. He has been held in Tora prison, with his detention regularly renewed every 15 days. Ibrahim started a hunger strike on July 30 protesting his imprisonment. Human Rights Watch then criticized the government’s decision and called for his release.
The move to prosecute Ibrahim and the other four activists has drawn wide criticism from the country’s democracy campaigners.

“This confirms the [Egyptian] government’s intention to use emergency law to terrorize political and rights activists,” read a statement signed by 21 local human rights organizations soon after the prosecutor’s decision.

Ibrahim’s lawyers say he has been held for three months, during which the accusation of belonging to an underground group was never on the interrogators’ lips. “That was added to the list of allegations at the last moment because the security services have no case in the first place,” said Ahmed Seif, the director of Hisham Mubarak Law Center (HMLC), who is among Ibrahim’s defense team. “They stitched up the set of accusations as Ashraf [Ibrahim]’s case was becoming too embarrassing for them.”

Emergency high state security courts, whose verdicts cannot be appealed except by the president himself, were established in the beginning of 1980s to deal with “emergency cases” under the country’s now 23-year-old emergency law—long perceived by the local activists as the Grim Reaper to any voice of dissent. International rights watchdogs have criticized these courts, saying they fall short of meeting the international standards for a fair trial.

The exceptional courts, however, is not the only issue upsetting those concerned with the state of human rights in Egypt. International rights watchdogs have regularly blasted Egypt over the treatment of its detainees. Nine months ago, the Geneva-based UN Committee on Torture expressed its concern over “widespread evidence of torture and ill-treatment in administrative premises under the control of the State Security Investigation.” Other rights watchdogs, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, condemned the crackdown on and ill treatment of antiwar protestors during March and April this year, as well as Ibrahim’s prosecution.

Only last week, 16 prominent Egyptian activists publicly announced the formation of a new society to combat torture—a practice, they say, is “systematically” used by the police and intelligence services.

“When we talk about torture in Egypt, we are not talking about random violations here and there. We are talking about a repressive policy adopted by the ministry of interior and the security services in continuous and systematic fashions against the citizens,” read the founding statement of the Egyptian Society for Combating Torture.

The list of 16 founding signatories included familiar names to Egypt’s activists’ scene. Aida Seif Al Dawla (the new society’s president) and Susan Fayyad are doctors associated with the Nadeem Center that provides medical and legal aid for torture victims. Emad Mubarak and Gasser Abdel Razek are working with HMLC, which has taken up labor issues and stepped to the forefront of the antiwar and Palestinian solidarity movements. Other names include leftist activists like Alaa Kamal, Adel Wassili and Adel Al Mashad.

Their request for license submitted to the government’s ministry of social affairs have been turned down yesterday. But the activists are still determined to go ahead.

“We want to take the [torture] issue to the street, and throw a rock in the still water,” hopes Hossam Bahgat, one of the signatories who runs the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The aim of the new front, he says, is not providing legal or medical aid, but to launch campaigns that can involve a wider audience outside the torture victims and their families.

With tactics, seemingly borrowed from rights movements in other parts of the world, the activists are hoping to attract public attention to their cause. Public protests are planned with candlelights in front of police stations where alleged torture incidents happen, Bahgat said. Emailing lists and chat rooms will also be launched.

Drawing the world’s attention to local grievances, however, can prove costly to the activists. One of the accusations made against Ashraf Ibrahim was “decimating false news that tarnishes the [Egyptian] state’s image”—a charge quite similar to that made in the past against democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim and other dissidents.

The accusation highlights the regime’s sensitivity to foreign criticism and its image abroad, especially amid the post-9/11 stream of Western media attacks against Arab autocracy in general, and those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt in specific. Their implicit (and in some cases explicit) line of criticism argues that 9/11 was born in Egyptian jails. In other words, the use of torture against Islamists has pushed them to extremism.

The regime seems to be in no mood for more “scandals in front of the foreigners,” as an Egyptian colloquial saying goes.

While the regime’s sensitivity to its image abroad may have pushed the clampdown on the two Ibrahims as well as others, it also stands partially behind the latest introduced democratic reforms. Some (not all) forms of exceptional courts were abolished, together with hard labor prison sentences. Plans for a government-sponsored human rights body are materializing, and UN rights watchdog has noted some “positive developments.” Moreover, during the last 18 months, several low- and middle-ranking police officers faced were prosecuted on charges of ill treating criminal (not political) detainees. They were usually acquitted or given light sentences, however.

Some activists, including Seif of HMLC, speculated that the country’s foreign ministry had been pressing the local authorities for action over the human rights abuses, largely in response to the lobbying of media and international rights organs.
To the ministry’s embarrassment itself, the foreign minister’s assistant and veteran diplomat Dr. Abdallah Asha’al, resigned from his post accusing the minister of corruption, according to the letter of resignation obtained by the London-based Al Hayat.

In some cases, it seemed the intervention of the foreign ministry contributed directly to the release of detainees or the improvement of their prison conditions.

Ibrahim al-Sahary, a 37-year-old leftist journalist and antiwar activist, was detained and allegedly tortured twice by the State Security police twice last February and April. Sahary claimed his interrogators had asked him few times about his “connections to the [Egyptian] foreign ministry.” According to Sahary, the ministry officials were, then, pressuring the security services to release him, after rights groups lobbied Egyptian diplomatic missions in the US and some other Western countries

---