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FDHRD (Forum for Development and Human Rights Dialogue) is a member of GAATW in Cairo, Egypt. In July 2022, our colleague Emilia interviewed Mr Saeed Abdel Hafez (Founder and Director), Salma Adel (Head of International Relations Unit), and Rawan Raouf (Head of Sustainable Development Unit), to better understand their work.
Emilia Cebrián: Thank you for taking the time for this interview. Tell me a bit more about FDHRD - when was the organisation founded and what are your main areas of work?
Saeed Abdel Hafez: FDHRD was established in 2005. We have five programmes: a) Freedom of Expression and Speech, b) Integrity and Transparency, c) Counter-terrorism Watch, d) Human Trafficking and Women, and e) Egyptians Abroad. Ten years ago, we used to receive funding from international organisations such as USAID, the American Embassy in Egypt, and Freedom House, among others, but after the 2011 Revolution we weren’t allowed to receive funds from organisations abroad due to political, security, and legislative reasons, because the laws for associations changed several times. Currently, we depend on our Board of Trustees to fund our activities. Our organisation is small but we work well and deliver good results. We hold trainings in different parts of Egypt, as well as awareness-raising seminars and workshops, but our main activity is to publish research. We have excellent researchers who graduated from the British University in Egypt and Cairo University, and we have published around 100 research and policy papers on different topics. Our website is not very sophisticated but does the job. We also have a Facebook page with 30,000 followers where we sometimes publish videos on different topics, such as human rights and trafficking in persons.
EC: Why was FDHRD established?
SAH: I worked as the head of an international news network – an American organisation that established a branch in Egypt in 2003. I was first the Programme Coordinator and then Director, and for two years I published a newsletter called ‘Dialogue Forum’ for Internews. After that, I decided to establish an organisation for human rights and development focused on dialogue. In 2005, Egypt was going through a critical political situation. There was an initiative for political reform all over the world that called for changes in our institutions, particularly in our elections law, and there were multiple presidential elections for the first time. I thought that dialogue would be very important in order to discuss our issues on human rights and development. Between 1994 and 2003, before joining Internews, I had been working in an Egyptian organisation for human rights, first in the fieldwork unit as a researcher and lawyer, and then as the head of the fieldwork unit and Executive Director. These experiences consolidated my background in the field of human rights in Egypt.
EC: I can see that the emphasis of FDHRD on dialogue is linked to your background in Internews and the human rights field in the country.
SAH: It is safe for us to engage in these dialogues now. We invite people with different opinions and ideologies to discuss and publish papers, and no one can oppose this approach.
EC: You mentioned programmes on several issues, such as freedom of expression, anti-corruption, and human trafficking. What are the main dynamics in Egypt regarding these issues and who are the communities you support in your work?
SAH: We believe that there are no human rights without freedom of expression and belief. We mainly support journalists, writers, TV hosts, and through our programme on freedom of expression we also support Christians in Egypt to exercise their freedom of belief. There are around 10 million Christians in the country, and they sometimes experience restrictions that prevent them from expressing their religion, so we support them directly.
Our second programme focuses on anti-terrorism because Egypt has faced a conflict between Egyptian institutions and armed Islamic groups, which started directly after the assassination of President Sadat and continued until 1997. Since the 2011 revolution, the conflict between the Egyptian State and armed groups of Muslims arose again until last year. Terrorism became common; there are fundamentalist Islamic groups that are trying to implement the Sharia. Our programme focuses on monitoring and combating terrorism in the country, as well as on documenting its effects on the civil rights of Christians, writers, and civil society in general.
As for our human trafficking programme, this is a rather new topic in Egypt, so we try to raise awareness about it. We implemented a project funded by the American Embassy to train journalists on how to cover human trafficking issues in newspapers.
Corruption is also a major problem here. We publish many papers about corruption cases in several public sectors such as education, healthcare, national TV and local administrations. We held many seminars about corruption and the legislation that regulates anti-corruption initiatives. We have a good knowledge of what we can do as a national organisation with our small tools and limited funding. Our voice isn’t as loud as that of other organisations, but we focus on transparency and impartiality and we have a big impact.
EC: Since you work on topics that are sensitive, such as corruption and freedom of expression, do you experience any difficulties with either the government or other sectors of society that may not agree with what you do?
SAH: Not really, nobody directly opposes our work. We recently published a report about corruption in the Awqaf Ministry, which is the Ministry responsible for the mosques and religious endowments. Recently, we heard about ministers being arrested in corruption cases in the country, and this actually encouraged us. I think Egyptian institutions are not concerned about corruption or terrorism, their main concern is linked to security issues, such as torture, prisoners, which are really sensitive topics. We don’t work on torture because there are already many organisations focusing on it, so we work on development and human rights.
This doesn't mean that government institutions never resist our initiatives, sometimes they do. Once, we published a report about women who are in prison because of their debts. In Egypt, poor women go to sellers to buy electric appliances, such as TVs or washing machines, and if they cannot pay off their instalments, they end up in prison. We published a report on this issue stating the number of women in prison, and the Ministry of Interior published a press release attacking us, saying that our numbers were wrong, despite our figures being documented by the Ministry of Solidarity. That was a sensitive topic because we talked about prisoners, but we did not reply to those accusations. We also released a report about migrants in Poland, and the Polish Ambassador in Egypt published an article in a very well-known magazine saying that we were wrong, but we do not engage in arguments. We do our job; we publish our studies and if anyone has a comment, that is okay.
EC: I saw that you have one recent report on your website about the crisis in Ukraine and how there are different standards for Ukrainians fleeing from conflict and Palestinians fleeing conflict. Could you tell me a bit more about these publications?
SAH: When we analyse both conflicts from a human rights perspective, we see that there is international solidarity and huge media coverage of the war in Ukraine, but we don’t find the same approach when it comes to the Palestinian conflict. We are concerned about this double standard when in both cases the approach should be the same since both are humanitarian issues.
EC: Why do you think that this double standard exists?
SAH: It's related to how Europeans see Arab citizens. This is linked to another paper we published showing the different treatment that European countries give to refugees and migrants fleeing from Ukraine and how they treated Africans and other Arabs. It’s about how European countries perceive Ukrainians as people who are like them, particularly through comments in the media, but we are like them too. They think that Arabs are beneath them and so if Arabs die, it’s because they brought it upon themselves. This is where we see the difference in treatment.
EC: And how do you work with victims of human trafficking?
SAH: We are part of a coalition called the Egyptian Coalition for Human Rights and Development (ECHRD), which was established in 2015. There are 500 organisations registered in 14 governorates across Egypt (Upper Egypt, Delta, and Cairo) and through this network, we access cases of human trafficking. Egypt has 2,000 governorates, and five or six of them are well-known for different types of human trafficking, including tourist marriage, organ removal, illegal immigration, and forced labour. We usually meet with the victims, document their statements, and publish their stories. Sometimes we do not publish their names to ensure anonymity. We focus on raising awareness by writing reports and working with lawyers and journalists to shed light on human trafficking, but we do not provide legal, psychological, or financial aid to the victims because we don’t have that capacity.
EC: We know that sometimes trafficked persons are afraid of sharing their stories or publicly discussing their experiences. Is this something that you have encountered in your work?
SAH: Whenever we meet with a victim, we do our best to ensure that they feel comfortable. We have experience in establishing a safe meeting with a comfortable atmosphere, and people here are also very kind.
EC: What about traffickers – do you know who they are and how they operate?
Salma Adel: They are organised crime syndicates. We know some of them and many others have come to light in recent years. Some are still being hunted by the police. There are different types of syndicates, some focus on organ removal to sell on the black market, others on begging, and there are also syndicates that organise for tourists to marry underage girls. In this last case, they are not always criminals, sometimes they include professionals and public figures, such as doctors, and private hospitals are also implicated. In the case of tourist marriage, there are many lawyers involved, and this is because the lawyers are the mediators between the men from the Gulf area and the families in poor villages to ensure that the marriage takes place and there is a contract. This is a well-established system. Recently, the Egyptian court published a penalty in some cases of human trafficking in the country.
EC: Were there any trafficking cases linked to the conflict between the Egyptian institutions and armed extremist groups?
SAH: Not within Egypt, but there are cases of people being trafficked to Libya and Syria.
EC: I don’t have any more questions. Is there anything else you would like to add?
SAH: No. We hope to connect with GAATW’s international network.