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Egypt

Amnesty International Blasts Egypt, Says Sisi Pardons Just A Guise

Though the Egyptian president has authorized the release of some 100 political prisoners, the global human rights organization says thousands more are languishing inside prisons for doing no more than engaging in peaceful protest.

Pardoned Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Fahmy in Cairo on Aug. 29
Pardoned Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Fahmy in Cairo on Aug. 29

CAIRO — Human rights organization Amnesty International has advised the international community not to be fooled by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's "veneer of reform and empty promises."

Sisi issued presidential pardons for 100 young people on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, including activists Yara Sallam and Sanaa Seif, and journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, who were sentenced to three years last August in the internationally condemned Al Jazeera case.

Some of them were released immediately, and others after a slight delay, such as Salwa Mehrez, whose name was listed wrongly in the presidential decree. But in a statement Monday, the international rights organization specifically highlighted the cases of seven activists who still remain behind bars.

Nahed Abdel Hamid, Momen Abdel Tawab, Menna Mostafa, Abrar al-Anany, Mamdouh Gamal Eddin, Mohamed Hossam Eddin and Asmaa Abdel Aziz Shehata are still in prison due to bureaucratic issues, according to lawyer Ragia Omran.

Amnesty argued that the decree clearly states that all those pardoned should be released immediately unless they have been sentenced in other cases.

Said Boumedouha, Deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Amnesty International, says that most of those pardoned "should never have been locked up in the first place, because they were peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly."

He adds, "Given the authorities' intolerance of peaceful dissent, the space vacated in prison cells by those freed in the pardon will be filled up again all too soon," as political prisoners are used as "bargaining chips," and only released when politically expedient, or to deflect international criticism of Egypt's human rights record.

There were also others not included in the pardons who should have been, Amnesty asserts, including Alaa Abd Al Fattah, Ahmed Douma, Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel, as well as Mahienour al-Massry, detained photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (known as Shawkan) and student Mahmoud Hussein.

"Amnesty International is aware of thousands more people across the country who have been languishing in Egyptian prisons under President al-Sisi's rule, including other journalists and activists," the organization's statement reads. It was released just hours before Sisi was scheduled to address the UN General Assembly in New York.

"If the President wants to convince the UN General Assembly in his speech today that Egypt's appalling human rights record is a thing of the past, he will have to implement meaningful reforms," Boumedouha says.

He urges the United States and France to halt the transfer of small arms and ammunition to Egypt, "and other policing equipment used to commit mass violations" against protesters.

"The international community must not let Sisi and the Egyptian government off the hook because of the recent pardons."

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Economy

France, Portrait Of A Nation In Denial — In Our World In Denial

The continuous increase of public debt and a tone-deaf president in France, the rise of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world, the blindness to global warming: realities that we do not want to see and that will end up destroying us if we do not act.

Photo of ​police forces in riot gear clashing with demonstrators as piles of garbage burn in Paris on March 23

Police forces clashing with demonstrators as piles of garbage burn in Paris on March 23

Les Echos

-Analysis-

PARIS — In France, the denial of reality seems to be the only thing that all of our public figures have in common: The president (who is right to say that it is his role to propose unpopular measures) refuses to see that other solutions than his own were possible and that institutions will not be sufficient in the long term to legitimize his solitary decisions.

The parliamentary opposition groups refuse to see that they do not constitute a political majority, since they would be incapable of governing together and that they have in common, for too many of them, on both sides of the political spectrum, left and right, only the hatred of money, the mistrust of success, and the contempt for excellence.

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