RIGHTS-EGYPT: New Laws To Regulate Civil Society

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Hossam Hassan

CAIRO, Jan 12 2000 (IPS) - Egypt is changing an outdated law, passed in 1964 in an era of heavy government intervention in all spheres of life, to regulate the activities of non-governmental organisations (ngos).

The outdated law, dubbed Law 32, has been described by ngos as bureaucratic and unfit to regulate the activities of the more than 14,000 NGOs registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs.

The process of reforming the law, however, started off on a bad note last year. The draft, NGOs say, was leaked to them, and that it did not reflect the views of all NGOs.

Rights groups protested that the draft was restrictive and aimed to inhibit civil work.

The campaign against the bill was led primarily by rights organisations because they had most at stake. Many rights groups had registered as non-profit civil companies in a bid to avoid the bureaucratic entanglements of Law 32. Under the new law, they would be declared null and void if they did not register with the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Supporting the draft laws, Mervat Tellawi, former minister of social affairs, says the criminal law, currently in force in Egypt, is not sufficient to punish violations by NGOs. “It has failed to deal with cases in which people registered organisations offshore, or registered them illegally within the country”, he says.

Opposition also came from development organisations, such as the NGO Forum for Civil Action, which was formed in 1998 to defend the rights of NGOs and follow up on the bill.

In November, Amina El-Guindi, the new minister of social affairs, said the new laws would turn “a new leaf for relations between NGOs and the government and pave the way for a joint partnership”.

NGOs have six months to register with the Ministry of Social Affairs, from the date of the publication of the executive regulations last November, or face being declared defunct.

How plausible this partnership will be, is questionable. Many NGOs, believing that the executive regulations are an improvement, have already sought registration with the Ministry of Social Affairs.

Amir Salem, director of the Legal Research Centre for Human Rights, who took part in drafting the executive regulations, believes that the registration would give the ngos a greater scope of action to promote human rights and minimise the risk of being attacked by the government.

Hafez Abu Se’da, secretary general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), insists that registration is merely intended to gain a legal licence and did not mean acceptance of the new law. He says there will be sustained resistance against the law because it violates the constitution and international conventions and charters.

Gasser Abdel-Razek of the Hisham Mubarak Centre for Human Rights Legal Aid is confident that life will continue after the new law. “The NGO movement does not end; it is only the beginning of a new struggle. We will continue to lobby for changing the NGO law,” he says.

The previous struggle by activists against the law included the holding of news conferences, a hunger strike and a sit-down protest by activists in front of parliament, as well as pleas to the president and the prime minister.

Abdel-Razek argues that while the executive regulations made some things clearer, or “slightly nicer,” the basic problems are still there, starting from the registration process and the election of the board of the NGO federation to the very mandate of the NGO.

The law has been sent to the Supreme Constitutional Court, following a dispute between an NGO in Tanta, 250 kilometres north of the capital Cairo, and the ministry. The saga has brought to light the growing tension over the role of the state and NGOs in view of the current economic policies.

Tellawi passionately asserts that there is no state of conflict between the government and NGOs: “NGOs are made up of our citizens. They are our partners in development. It is not a war.”

Rights groups, however, disagree. They point to the plight of Abu Se’da who was recently summoned by the general prosecutor and a lawsuit case against the EOHR reopened.

Earlier this year, Abu Se’da was detained on grounds of accepting an illegal cheque from the British Embassy, allegedly to undermine the unity and security of the country. The EOHR’s report on widespread human rights violations in the southern village of El-Kosheh was at the centre of the case.

Abu Se’da believes that the case, which is likely to go to court, is related to the NGO law “because the government is expecting the human rights organisations’ campaigns against the law to continue”.

The clamp down against rights organisations, suggests Abu Se’da, is likely to increase this year.

“Firstly, there are no promising signs that the government will be making political changes to push forward a process of democratisation. As it continues to violate human rights, it will continue to seek to delegitimise and thwart opposing voices – by calling them agents of the West, by claiming they are threatening national unity, security or peace etc,” he says.

“Secondly, as the economic crisis deepens, and the suffering increases, they will expect more voices of opposition, which they would want to thwart,” he adds.

With the effects of economic liberalisation on the poor being recognised by all, the government has repeatedly called for participation by businessmen and NGOs in poverty alleviation. However, NGOs argue that those who want to do more than provide welfare services are simply not welcome partners.

Economic liberalisation has not been accompanied by political liberalisation; the opposite is true, NGOs believe.

Nasser Amin, a lawyer with the Arab Centre for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession, is equally pessimistic about a possible improvement in relations with the government.

He believes the essence of the problem is the government’s persistent attempts at controlling the output of human rights organisations and its rejection of NGOs playing the role of watchdog on human rights violations committed by the government.

After the end of the six-month registration period, Nasser predicts there will be “a honeymoon period of another six months, during which the government will go easy on NGOs, but afterward it will start to intervene in the affairs of the NGOs it does not trust, harassing and bullying them as it sees fit.”

Whether the government chooses to implement the law in a way that is flexible and empowering to NGOs, as it has claimed, remains to be seen. But the current picture is bleak, indeed.