The annual report produced by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom includes harsh criticism of Egypt. How will the government respond, asks Mohamed Abdel-Baky A report produced by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and published on 29 April has severely criticised Egypt, saying that "serious problems of discrimination, intolerance, and other human rights violations against members of religious minorities, remain widespread." This is not the first time that a report produced by the commission, a federal US government body, has led to disagreements between Cairo and Washington. The commission's annual reports have repeatedly placed Egypt on a "watch list", together with India, Indonesia, Turkey and Cuba over the past eight years, the same ranking being applied in this year's report. Commissioners sitting on the USCIRF are appointed by the US president in consultation with the leaders of both the main political parties sitting in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Reaction to the report was swift to come from the Egyptian government. According to Ambassador Wael Abul-Magd, head of the Human Rights Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the report does not give a credible image of religious freedom in Egypt. "While we cannot deny that there are problems, as there are in many countries, the USCIRF report is not the right place to read about the state of religious freedom in Egypt," Abul-Magd told Al-Ahram Weekly. There were questions about the credibility and level of professionalism of the US commission, Abul-Magd said, reflected in the reports it has issued over the last few years. A USCIRF team carried out a research trip to Egypt in January this year, in order to assess religious freedom in meetings with Egyptian officials and civil society representatives. The visit took place shortly after six Coptic Christians and one Muslim were killed outside a church on Coptic Christmas Eve in the town of Nagaa Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The report harshly criticises the way the Egyptian government dealt with the incident and its handling of sectarian tensions. According to the report, there has been a "significant increase in violent attacks targeting Coptic Orthodox Christians and their property. In most cases, perpetrators have not been convicted. This increase in violence, and the failure to prosecute those responsible, fosters a growing climate of impunity, especially in Upper Egypt." However, Abul-Magd said the government had acted swiftly to deal with the Nagaa Hammadi incident, with police arresting the perpetrators of the attack within hours and the state prosecutor-general travelling to the scene to lead the investigation. Abul-Magd added that the government's swift actions had made the incident a model of how sectarian tensions should be handled. "The government's actions in this case should have indicated to the commission that we are very serious about improving the situation regarding religious freedom in the country, but it seems instead commission officials want to ignore the facts," Abul-Magd said. One source close to the commission in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, also told the Weekly that there were clear errors of professionalism in the report. According to the source, the tone of the report was determined by the results of the commission's visit to Egypt in January, which "was unsuccessful due to the Nagaa Hammadi incident." "We agree that the Egyptian government doesn't have a perfect record on human rights, but anybody who knows Egypt knows that religious freedom cannot be judged on the basis of one incident. Things are much more complicated than that," the source said. Leonard Leon, chairman of the commission, told the Weekly in an interview that the USCIRF report does not deny that progress has been made in protecting religious freedom in Egypt. USCIRF had found increased public space in Egypt to debate a wide range of religious freedom concerns, including sectarian violence, this having been "discouraged and prevented by Egyptian authorities" in previous years, Leon said. He added that USCIRF had welcomed a February 2010 ruling in the Qena governorate in Upper Egypt, where a court had convicted and sentenced five men to life in prison for the murder of two Christians in 2009. "However, there are many other court cases, particularly the Nagaa Hammadi case, where proceedings are pending or justice has not been served," Leon said. For his part, Abul-Magd also criticised the USCIRF report for what he described as the "systemic way in which it mixes the facts", especially when the report claimed that Egypt's emergency laws were being used to support the violation of the freedoms of some religious groups. The report had not given any evidence of this, Abul-Magd said, which was unsurprising since the Egyptian government does not use the emergency laws against anyone because of his or her religious views. In an interview with the Weekly, Nabil Abdel-Fattah, an expert at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said that one of the problems behind the report was the fact that the USCIRF and the US State Department annual report used different standards to evaluate religious freedom in Egypt. The language used in the reports is not acceptable to the Egyptian public or, often, to Egyptian intellectuals, Abdel-Fattah said, though this was not to say that there was not a problem regarding religious freedom in the country. Leon defended the commission's report by claiming that courts acting under the emergency laws had been used to detain and try individuals deemed by the state to have "unorthodox" or "deviant" Islamic or other religious beliefs or practices, such as Shia Muslims and dissident Sunni Muslims. In their recommendations, the report's authors proposed that the US administration establish a timetable for the implementation of political and human rights reforms in Egypt. If deadlines are not met, "the US government should reconsider the appropriate allocation of its assistance to the Egyptian government," they said. Over the past five years the US Congress and Bush administration did not attach conditions to the aid that Egypt receives from the US or reallocate it. However, the Obama administration has decreased the aid given to Egyptian civil society organisations, reducing it from $56 million a year to $25 million for 2010. According to Leon, the timetable of reforms referred to in the report involved removing religious affiliation from official identity documents and passing a law for the construction and repair of places of worship. The commission had discussed concerns over religious freedom in Egypt with a number of US government officials, Leon said, who had assured it that the concerns were taken seriously by the US state department. Assistant US Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner had expressed concerns about what he called the atmosphere of "intolerance related to sectarian violence during his visit in January," Leon said, adding that Posner had also described human rights issues in Egypt as being a priority for the department in March. However, one Egyptian diplomat speaking to the Weekly said that human rights had barely been mentioned in recent meetings with American officials. "The Egypt-US relationship is much too sophisticated to be compromised because of concerns raised by human rights groups, but that does not mean that we will stop the reforms. On the contrary, we will continue them," the diplomat said.
