As Egypt hosts COP27, human rights advocates seize their opportunity

The obstacles activists have had to overcome in order to protest at this year’s climate change conference in Egypt, COP27, have been immense: interrogations over planned chants, the vetting of handwritten signs, questions over whether one’s traditional attire implied a political message, to name just some.

“There is almost no space for protests or activism. We are concerned on how this will affect the outcome at this COP,” says Joseph Sikulu, from Tongatapu, quickly rolling up his sign after a two-minute protest in the conference’s “blue zone.”

“It is the job of civil society to be here to hold these conference negotiators to account,” says Mr. Sikulu, a member of the Pacific Climate Warriors, “and so many voices that should be here are not present.”

And yet this tightly controlled climate conference seems a bastion of freedom compared with what Egyptian citizens confront beyond the walls of this Red Sea resort town.

From Cairo to Alexandria, amid bubbling economic discontent, Egypt’s crackdown on liberties – once mainly targeting journalists, activists, and opposition politicians – is affecting each part of Egyptians’ daily lives at a time they feel financially pushed to the limits.

Apolitical Egyptians are finding that an absence of human rights and freedoms they once viewed as political or abstract is now degrading their dignity, even robbing them of the simplest joys. 

In Cairo, the laughter that once permeated the city’s streets is now rarely heard.

Even asking someone about the weather fills their eyes with fear as they consider whether their response could land them in jail or if they should answer at all.  

“Will this put me in trouble? Does the government know you are talking to me? Do you have permits?” residents continuously ask a permit-holding reporter.

“As an Egyptian, one doesn’t even need to be an activist to know prison is only one wrong word away,” says Abdelrahman ElGendy, an Egyptian activist and former political prisoner who spent years in prison, via messaging app.

Building a new Egypt

While crushing dissent, however, the government and its military-owned companies build and build. They say they are creating a better and more secure Egypt for their people. A series of megaprojects that have improved services and daily life include new highways, improved airport terminals, a widened Suez Canal, and a new, glossy, and perfectly manicured capital in the desert.

It was part of the bargain many Egyptians, seeking stability and prosperity, struck in 2013 by backing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and a return to military rule after tumultuous years of revolution.

But that deal is seeming one-sided:

• Behind newly beautified buildings’ facades are crumbling, decades-old interiors.
• Apartment blocks that are painted on one side facing highways remain stained and sooty on the others.
• New or widened highways that cut through residential areas lack proper drainage and are prone to flooding.
• The hundreds of Egyptians displaced by the megaprojects and, amid great media fanfare, given new housing, now face higher rent and bills for maintenance they cannot afford.
• Much of the new development that is displacing local communities is geared toward wealthy people.
• New Cairo, in the desert, remains largely empty, devoid of residents.
• And anyone who dares to puncture the government’s depiction of a perfect Egypt is challenging the state – and risking jail. Expressions of unhappiness here are viewed as a political threat.

There is little for Egyptians to be happy about these days.

President Sisi’s megaprojects were largely carried out with borrowed funds, and Egypt’s national debt, now $158 billion, or 88% of gross domestic product, and increased borrowing have led it to devalue the pound.

Most recently, to secure a $3 billion International Monetary Fund aid package, the currency slid 15% Oct. 27 to an all-time low of 23 Egyptian pounds to the dollar.

The resulting inflation, made worse by pandemic- and Ukraine-war-related supply chain issues, has led to a jump in food and energy prices and pushed many middle- and upper-middle-class Egyptians into poverty, and those in poverty into even more dire situations.

But few would dare say it out loud.

“Egypt has become a republic of fear in recent years,” says Hossam Bahgat, founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of the last three licensed independent human rights organizations in the country. “There really is no room for work on the ground by civil society groups without the risk of arrest or political prosecution. This has taken away people’s ability to say how policies are affecting them.”

Amr Magdi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who himself was forced to leave Egypt because of his human rights work, concurs.

“The cost for peaceful protest or dissent in Egypt has literally been either murder or jail,” he says, “and we have seen tens of thousands of protesters arrested and prosecuted.”

But Egyptians are finding “dissent” is a kitchen-table issue.

“The regime is making policies that enrich the rich and hurt working-class people, and we cannot say a word,” says an Egyptian villager south of Cairo who requested anonymity. “We never thought human rights meant bread and affordable cooking gas.”

Clampdown in Cairo

Last week, as world leaders assembled in Sharm el-Sheikh, Cairo resembled a city under occupation. Gun-toting police officers prowled the streets; in some neighborhoods they stood on every street corner as armored vehicles rumbled back and forth.

Egyptian opposition figures located abroad had called on people at home to mount protests Nov. 11 to challenge Mr. Sisi at a time his security services presumably would be spread thin. 

The call filled Egyptians with dread: Whom would the police stop, who would disappear, who would pay the price?

According to independent media outlet Mada Masr and rights groups, even before COP27 launched Egyptian authorities had arrested 600 people, mainly young men profiled as potential protesters and taken from their homes or picked up off the streets.

“We don’t want another revolution or violence, but we are also suffering beyond the brink we can bear,” one weary Cairene said the evening before the planned protests. “We just want to live our daily lives in peace without looking over our shoulders.”

Said another: “We don’t want protests, we don’t want to go to jail, and we don’t want trouble. We just want to be able to feed our children and send them to school with a full stomach. Or, better yet, we want to leave.”

That Thursday, plainclothes police could be seen corralling Cairo residents into taking part in a pro-Sisi counterdemonstration.

In the end, no protests materialized in Egypt Nov. 11, just another cycle of repression and worry characteristic of Egypt’s capital in recent years.

COP27

Yet the bleakness of daily life in Egypt is why the global climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh has been a “ray of light” and a once-in-a-decade “chance for change” that Egyptian rights activists say they couldn’t afford to miss.

“In our view it has been a rare and useful opportunity for us to have the global spotlight on Egypt for a few weeks. The world has forgotten Egypt under Sisi because it appears to be a stable country in a very unstable region,” says Mr. Bahgat, among the loudest voices for Egyptian rights at COP.

“We think COP should go to wherever civil society needs to be seen and heard, and we definitely need to be seen and heard.”

Despite restrictions, and thanks to the work of Egyptian activists attending the conference through the sponsorship of Western organizations, Egypt’s human rights track record has dominated COP.

A central focus has been on Alaa Abdel Fattah, the hunger-striking Egyptian-British democracy activist. A figure in the country’s 2011 pro-democracy revolution, he has been languishing in Egyptian prisons for most of the last eight years.

The fate of Mr. Abdel Fattah, who stopped drinking water as world leaders gathered last week, was raised by the United States and Britain, mentioned in thousands of media articles, and brought up during President Joe Biden’s visit to COP27.

A letter from Mr. Abdel Fattah to his family on Monday stated he had stopped his hunger strike, and on Thursday family members said they were finally able to see him from behind a glass shield at the prison outside Cairo, Agence France-Presse reported. His sister, Mona Seif, tweeted that his health has “deteriorated severely in the past two weeks,” AFP said.

Rather than just highlight the plight of one activist, however, rights activists say they are out to make gains, clawing back some of the civil space from the Egyptian state.

Yet Western human rights observers at Sharm el-Sheikh warned that as soon as the government delegations and media outlets pack up their bags and fly out of the Red Sea resort this weekend, the Egyptian state will strike back and punish the Egyptians who dared speak out.

Lama Fakih, Middle East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, issued a statement expressing such concerns.

“From surveillance to intimidation to outright arrests,” she said, “the behavior of the Egyptian authorities while the spotlight is on the country raises alarm bells about what may happen after COP27 is over.”