The UN Human Rights Council adopted the outcome of Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva on 2 July, following the government’s formal response to recommendations made during the January review. Cairo presented its record as one of progress. Independent rights organisations described a gulf between those assurances and the experiences of women, detainees, journalists and migrants.
Egypt’s response, submitted in June, treated many recommendations as measures already in place. Rights groups argued that the government was more receptive to broad expressions of support than to demands for specific legislative changes, international commitments, institutional safeguards or releases from detention that could be measured before the next review.
The January session drew interventions from 137 states on torture, enforced disappearance, political imprisonment, restrictions on journalism and human rights work, violence against women and girls, and the use of new cases to keep defendants in pretrial detention. Recommendations also addressed freedom of association and assembly, social spending and accountability for alleged abuses by state authorities.
The final total was 343 recommendations. In its official response, Egypt reported accepting 281 in full or in part and taking note of 62. “Noted” is the UPR designation for recommendations a state does not support; the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) characterised its use as rejection without saying so explicitly.
The government said recommendations it did not support faced constitutional or legal obstacles, conflicted with national values, or rested on information it considered inaccurate. EIPR challenged that reasoning and the claim that reforms demanded by other states had already been delivered.
Violence against women: a government defence
Among the measures the government presented as already addressed were recommendations concerning violence against women, domestic abuse, discriminatory laws, corporal punishment of children, safeguards in detention and limits on the death penalty. Women’s rights advocates interviewed by Zawia3 disputed that account, particularly the suggestion that existing legislation provides an adequate response to domestic and sexual violence.
Nevine Ebeid, chair of the New Woman Foundation’s board of trustees, says the brutality of attacks on women makes official denials increasingly untenable.
“Whatever attempts the Egyptian government makes to deny the spread of violence against women, the facts on the ground now speak louder than any statement. What we are seeing is not only an increase in crimes, but an escalation in their brutality, extending to torture before murder.”
Ebeid cites reported attacks involving a gas cylinder and corrosive substances, as well as the death of Egyptian woman Aya Adel in Jordan. For her, these cases point to forms of violence that cannot be dismissed as isolated incidents. She describes a pattern of attacks, including killings in public, in which women are targeted because they are women.
She connects the government’s response to earlier official reactions to collective sexual assaults and so-called virginity tests after the January 2011 uprising. In her view, treating those allegations as attempts to damage Egypt’s reputation established a pattern that continues: protecting the country’s image abroad at the expense of acknowledging women’s suffering at home.
Ebeid argues that a comprehensive law against violence requires a wider review of the legal framework. She points to Article 17 of the Penal Code, which allows mitigation of sentences, and Article 60, concerning acts carried out in good faith under a right recognised by sharia. Women’s organisations have criticised the use of such provisions to excuse or reduce punishment for violence.
She sees little political or administrative willingness to address these issues as a priority. The prolonged struggle over personal-status legislation, including rules affecting non-Muslims, is another example, she says, of reform becoming entangled in political and social resistance.
“The absence of legislation is not merely a technical or legal matter,” Ebeid says. “It directly reflects the nature of a political system that overlooks violence against women and does not place their concerns among its priorities.”
Edraak for Development and Equality’s 2024 monitoring report documented 1,195 incidents of violence against women and girls in Egypt, including 540 attributed to members of victims’ families. These are cases captured by the organisation’s monitoring, rather than an estimate of all violence nationwide.
The report recorded 363 killings. The figures cited included 261 linked to family violence involving a current or former partner or another relative, and 67 committed by people outside the family. Those two categories do not account for every killing in the overall total. The reported methods included stabbing, at 23.1%, strangulation at 19%, and fatal beatings at 15.4%.
Samar El-Husseiny, executive director of the Egyptian Human Rights Forum, says the government’s presentation overlooks a fundamental weakness in the law’s treatment of sexual violence. Marital rape is not explicitly criminalised, she says, despite a long legal and social campaign by feminist organisations.
She argues that refusing a unified law leaves violence against women addressed through scattered provisions across multiple statutes. In her assessment, this weakens both enforcement and prevention. She also questions the practical safeguards available to complainants and witnesses, the training of officials receiving sexual-violence complaints, and whether survivors encounter a system sensitive to their needs.
“Calling for a unified law is not a radical demand or a human rights luxury,” El-Husseiny says. “It is a normal and obvious demand that feminist organisations have raised for years.”
For her, the disparity between official claims and survivors’ experiences suggests that women’s rights are being treated as an issue of international publicity rather than domestic reform.
In March 2022, a coalition of feminist organisations, working with MP Nashwa El-Deeb, submitted a draft comprehensive law against violence against women. Supported by 60 MPs, its 53 articles included explicit provisions on domestic violence. More than three years later, the proposal had still not been debated, even as the parliamentary term approached its end and new elections drew nearer.
The death penalty and demands for change
At the adoption of the UPR outcome, Egypt defended its use of capital punishment as confined to the most serious crimes. Rights organisations challenged that position, citing the breadth of offences carrying a death sentence and concerns about due process.
EIPR counted at least 29 recommendations addressing capital punishment, including calls to reduce the number of capital offences, suspend executions with a view to abolition, and join the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It highlighted recommendations from African states including Mozambique and Sierra Leone, arguing that they undermined a cultural justification for retaining the penalty.
El-Husseiny says Egypt continues to issue and carry out death sentences on a scale that raises serious concerns. She points in particular to collective sentencing and politically connected cases, where rights groups have questioned the fairness of proceedings and restrictions on defendants’ ability to mount a defence. She also sees a harder official position this year, replacing occasional indications of willingness to reconsider the punishment.
The Egyptian Front for Human Rights’ monitoring of 2024 recorded at least 380 death sentences issued by criminal courts, compared with 348 in 2023. It documented at least 13 executions, up from eight, and 35 death sentences upheld by the Court of Cassation, compared with 27 a year earlier.
These are distinct stages of the judicial process: a sentence issued by a criminal court is not the same as a final sentence upheld on appeal or an execution. The organisation reported that all 13 executions it documented in 2024 were in ordinary criminal cases, while some sentences issued or upheld that year involved political-violence cases.
The Egyptian Front argued that capital punishment extends beyond the narrowest category of the gravest crimes and that some defendants face violations of fair-trial guarantees. Such safeguards carry particular importance when a person’s life is at stake.
No political prisoners, no torture?
The government’s response rejected the premise that people are detained for their political opinions or for exercising freedom of expression. It maintained that criminal proceedings provide guarantees of justice and that counterterrorism legislation is directed at terrorist offences.
Rights groups disputed those assurances. They also challenged the government’s account of oversight in places of detention and of the National Council for Human Rights’ independence and ability to monitor abuses.
Before the review, EIPR had submitted five reports, individually or with partner organisations. They covered the deterioration it documented since the previous review in 2019; criminal justice, torture, enforced disappearance and detention conditions; pressure on human rights defenders through counterterrorism measures; women’s and girls’ rights; and digital rights, freedom of expression and the media.
Its separate commentary on the government’s UPR report was titled Parallel Reality. The submissions described restrictions arising from legislation as well as security and administrative practices, including the Protest Law, counterterrorism legislation and the cybercrime law.
The organisations also criticised prolonged pretrial detention and “recycling”: bringing detainees into new cases to prolong imprisonment, including after release decisions or as detention limits approach. They described the practice as a means of using custody as punishment rather than an exceptional investigative measure.
Basma Mostafa, programme director at the Law and Democracy Support Foundation, tells Zawia3 that official denials conflict with the cases her organisation documents.
“The Egyptian authorities’ claim that the country has no political prisoners, and that the terrorism law is not used against journalists and human rights defenders, completely contradicts the documented reality on the ground.”
Mostafa describes a recurring pattern of arbitrary arrest, extended pretrial detention and new cases against journalists, rights advocates and independent voices. Charges such as spreading false news or joining a terrorist group, she says, are repeatedly used to punish expression, often on the basis of security investigations she considers deficient in basic fair-trial safeguards.
She names journalist Mohamed Oxygen, photojournalist Hamdy El-Zaeem and lawyer Hoda Abdel Moneim among people whose cases illustrate these concerns. In her assessment, Egypt’s refusal to support 62 recommendations, including demands addressing detention and restrictive laws, demonstrates an absence of political will for meaningful reform.
Mostafa also warns about what she describes as transnational repression. Her organisation’s contribution to the UPR documented allegations of physical assaults and threats, media smear campaigns, prosecutions and pressure on relatives in Egypt targeting opponents and people living in exile. She also cites difficulties obtaining official documents and consular services and the use of terrorist designations against opponents abroad.
Human rights lawyer Halim Heneish, a consultant with Refugees Platform in Egypt, says the government’s insistence that safeguards already exist, and its denial of violations, are familiar. He stresses the importance of joining the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, a longstanding demand of rights groups including the Stop Enforced Disappearance campaign.
That demand should not be confused with an undertaking already given: Egypt did not support the recommendations calling for ratification of that convention. Considering international instruments and committing to join them are different steps.
Heneish says accession would impose legal constraints on practices associated with enforced disappearance and strengthen recognition of the offence in line with its international definition. He also alleges continuing torture and deaths in police custody, alongside a failure to hold those responsible to account.
He says that, in following cases over the preceding months, he observed roughly 20 to 25 arrests involving people whose conduct consisted of commenting online on deteriorating economic and living conditions. New cases continue to come before the Supreme State Security Prosecution, he says, often involving allegations of joining a banned group or spreading false news.
In his view, the underlying political problem cannot be resolved by pardon committees or case-by-case reviews alone. He argues that the security practices and legislation producing detention for expression must change.
Heneish also questions the impact of the reactivated Presidential Pardon Committee. According to his assessment of the period he monitored, new arrests outnumbered releases by about three to one. He believes the emphasis on exceptional release lists has displaced, rather than reinforced, routine release decisions by prosecutors.
“We do not only need committees, or even cosmetic changes to laws,” Heneish says. “We need a real shift in policies that recognises that freedom of expression is not a crime.”
In June, EIPR submitted a complaint to Prosecutor General Mohamed Shawky seeking an urgent investigation into the deaths of seven people at Omraniya police station within a year. It requested the temporary suspension of officers at the station pending investigation and criminal proceedings against anyone whose responsibility was established. By the time this report was published, no official response from the Public Prosecution or Interior Ministry had been identified.
The National Council for Human Rights under scrutiny
Egypt defended the National Council for Human Rights as an independent body empowered to monitor conditions in detention. Independent organisations challenged both its practical influence and the transparency of its work, questioning whether it could secure accountability or ensure its recommendations were acted upon.
Heneish calls it an honorary body without sufficient authority. He argues that restrictions on access to detention facilities undermine its monitoring role. He also describes its current membership as the weakest since its establishment and criticises members he believes defend the authorities’ reputation rather than press for remedies for victims.
The concerns extend to international accreditation. In its second session of 2024, the Sub-Committee on Accreditation of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) recommended downgrading the council from A to B status. Its report raised concerns about independence and effectiveness, including the appointment process and the council’s response to serious abuses.
A recommendation to downgrade, however, is not an immediately effective loss of status. The same document expressly provided for the council to retain A status until the committee’s second session in 2025, allowing time to demonstrate continued compliance with the Paris Principles. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that, by July 2025, the council had already lost the participation rights associated with A status.
The significance of the recommendation lay in the deficiencies identified and the pressure to remedy them. The Paris Principles set standards for the independence, mandate and functioning of national human rights institutions; accreditation evaluates conformity with those standards.
Refugees and migrants: rights on paper
The review also brought attention to the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers. Egypt is a party to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, yet advocates describe serious barriers to obtaining documents, legal residency, work permits and protection from exploitation.
Heneish says the obstacles push many people into the informal economy, where they face fraud, poor working conditions and limited routes to seek redress. He also points to differences in how nationalities are treated, compounding the vulnerability of people already struggling to establish lawful status and a livelihood.
“What we observe through our fieldwork confirms that migrant workers in Egypt face real suffering,” he says, describing difficulties that begin with residency and work-permit documents and extend to integration into formal employment. Without accessible legal routes, he argues, many have little choice but to take informal work without adequate safeguards.
Heneish sees a contradiction between international commitments and domestic practice. Ratifying a convention, he says, cannot substitute for implementing its protections and enabling people to access work and basic services.
“What migrants in Egypt need is not only protection from violations, but recognition as part of the economic and social fabric, and clear legal pathways that enable them to work and live with dignity.”
Established under the UN Human Rights Council framework created in 2006, the Universal Periodic Review examines every UN member state’s human rights record roughly every four and a half years. Other states make recommendations, while UN documentation and civil society submissions inform the process.
Its purpose is to encourage measurable progress in protecting rights and implementing international obligations. Egypt’s fourth review again exposed a central dispute: the government presents legal guarantees and institutional arrangements as evidence of progress, while independent organisations point to detention, violence and restrictions that they say those safeguards have failed to prevent.
