Six Egyptian human rights organizations called on the government to stop denying violations and to provide detailed written answers to the questions left unanswered during the review of Egypt’s record before the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, in a joint statement issued on Thursday, October 22, 2026. The organizations are the Committee for Justice, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, the Law and Democracy Support Foundation, the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, and HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement.
The committee reviewed Egypt’s combined periodic report on Thursday, October 15, 2026, during its 48th ordinary session in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. The organizations said the committee’s questions covered whether everyone under 18 is subject to specialized juvenile justice, the length of pretrial detention and judicial oversight of its renewal, and the separation of children from adults, amid the detention of children in security cases and allegations of torture, ill-treatment and enforced disappearance. They called for making available detailed data on the number of detained children, their places and conditions of detention, and said the government delegation mostly limited its answers to presenting legislation and strategies.
According to the statement, government representatives acknowledged the persistence of harmful practices, including the medicalization of female genital mutilation, and the existence of loopholes that allow circumventing the minimum age of marriage through undocumented marriages registered later. The review also addressed the difficulty children of Baha’i families face in obtaining civil documents because their parents’ marriages are not recognized, the rights of refugee and asylum-seeking children to education, basic services and civil registration, and the funding and independence of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood.
The African committee had in April 2026 admitted a complaint filed by the Committee for Justice, the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights on behalf of the child Bahaa El-Din Fathy Mohamed Maher Ismail Khalil, who was arrested by National Security Agency officers in September 2024 at the age of 16. The organizations say he was subjected to enforced disappearance and torture with electric shocks, and was held incommunicado for more than three months, and in solitary confinement for 45 days. The complaint has moved to the merits stage.
Photo: OER Africa via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
