Amnesty International urged Egypt to lift travel bans recently imposed on human rights lawyers Nasser Amin and Hoda Abdelwahab in a press statement issued Tuesday.
The travel bans are associated with the controversial and long-drawn Case 713/2011 (more popularly known as the “foreign funding case”), in which a number of NGOs and individuals were put under investigation for receiving foreign funding. During the course of this case, the operations of numerous NGOs were halted and many associated individuals were arrested, placed under travel bans and had their assets frozen.
One of the NGOs that was part of Case 713 was the Arab Centre for Independence of Judiciary and Legal Profession (ACIJLP), which was headed by Amin and Abdelwahab. Travel bans were placed on the two as a result.
The case ended recently on March 20, 2024, yet travel bans against Amin, Abdelwahab, and others continue.
Egypt has drawn international condemnation for poor treatment of NGOs and activists. For instance, in 2016, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released a statement condemning the “arbitrary and abusive” travel bans imposed on activists. In 2018 the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning Egypt’s “crackdown against civil society organisations, human rights defenders, peaceful activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, labour rights defenders and trade unionists, including by arresting and disappearing several of them and increasingly using counter-terrorism and state of emergency laws.” The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) released a nine-point criticism of Egypt’s law 49 of 2019 on Regulating the Exercise of Civil Work in 2021, opposing the law for further restricting the scope of freedom for civil work.