Egypt recently passed a new Child’s Law. One of the most controversial parts of the law was the criminalization of female circumcision, or FGM. I just did a story on this for yesterday’s edition of The World.
One things I discovered is that while the figure that’s commonly mentioned is that 96% of women in Egypt [...]

Letter to head of the Judges’ Club Zakariya Abdel Aziz from the three Mahalla detainees, Kamal El-Fayyoumy, Tareq Amin, and Karim El-Beheiry:
We would like in the beginning to correct certain information which has reached the press about our (the three of us) having been transferred to the prison hospital as a result of our hunger [...]

After the jump is a press release (in French) by Tunisian rights activist Sihem Bensedrine on the release of comic Hedi Ouled Baballah, who recently spent two months in prison for cannabis possession. It’s widely believed by Tunisian NGOs that the real reason for his imprisonment (and the beatings he received at the hands of [...]

How things are getting worse:

NEW YORK, Mar 27 (IPS) - One of the Arab world’s most widely respected non-governmental organisations is charging that at least 14 Middle East and North African governments are systematically violating the civil liberties of their citizens — and most of them are close U.S. allies in the war on terror.
In [...]

The Washington Independent is a new online magazine, mostly about Beltway politics. Spencer Ackerman has an intriguing piece on how the CIA had to learn interrogation and torture techniques from Middle Eastern countries after 9/11 has its own staff were largely untrained in them.

But 9/11 changed all that. Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the [...]

Egypt: Bloggers Plan Parallel Film Festival on Police Torture:
Egyptian bloggers have announced that, while the Cairo film festival is taking place from 27 November to 7 December, they will hold a parallel festival in which a “Golden Whip” will be awarded to the best video showing “controversial acts of torture allegedly committed by the security [...]

I have just received this press release from the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession (ACIJLP — yes, that’s a mouthful) saying that the police officers who beat and molested Emad al-Kabir last year. It’s good news in an otherwise pretty awful case — remember that al-Kabir, a bus [...]

Middle East Online has a translation of a Monde Diplomatique article I’d previously linked to on the reversal of agrarian reform in Egypt. This excerpt deals with the new law passed in the 1990s that has led to many farmers losing land and helped former landlords regain land they had been forced to sell under [...]

The Israeli government and President Bush are right about the UN Human Rights Council: it does not fairly spread blame for human rights abuses. But the problem is not that it blames Israel too much — it does quite an appropriate job in that. It’s just that it should also focus on other countries, including [...]

Readers may be interested to know that Berkeley Press has just launched the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights.

Speaking of crackdowns in Egypt, it seems that NGOs working on torture are also being targeted:
CAIRO, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Egypt has told a rights group that aids torture victims it will be shut down for financial misdeeds, the group said on Thursday, in what activists called a government effort to quash criticism.
The Association for [...]

The video below, updated to Google Video by Ikhwanweb.com, a Muslim Brotherhood website, shows an interview with a child and his mother, who say he was tortured in a police station in Mansoura, northern Egypt. The video is graphic and shows the child’s burn wounds and other injuries. As horrible as these scenes are, it [...]

Activists’ parents accuse Tehran of torturing their sons:
Fears that Iran is systematically mistreating political prisoners and dissidents have been further fuelled after the parents of three detained student activists claimed their sons had been tortured.
In a letter to the country’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the parents alleged that the students have suffered a [...]

I have this article on qantara.de on the WWII mines and other ammunition left behind on Egypt’s North coast. The Egyptian government wants to re-launch its efforts to clear the zones that are affected, but wants to have it all paid for by its international donors.
As Egypt has brought to perfection the art of [...]

I haven’t had time lately to look into the arrests of several members of a “Quranist” group — people who reject the hadith and present a reformist practice of Islam based entirely on the Quran — but as well as being a blatant violation of freedom of belief, there seems to be several other overlapping [...]

The rabidly Zionist, MEMRI outlet, New York Sun has an interesting piece by Eli Lake, a reporter formerly based in Cairo who knows the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about how the State Dept. and other US agencies are considering engaging with the MB. Robert Leiken, who recently wrote a Foreign Affairs piece advocating engagement (see posts [...]

Most of the Gulf countries have made it onto the Tier 3 list (those countries with the worst record in human trafficking, according to the report) of the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2007: Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. UAE is on the Tier 2 watch list.
So is Egypt. From the report:
Egypt [...]

More fine reporting by Stephen Grey, who literally wrote the book on rendition, about the upcoming Council of Europe findings on the CIA flights in Europe:
Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council’s report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also [...]

When opposition politicians and rights groups complained that amendments to Egypt’s constitution would enshrine the Emergency Law in the Constitution by giving police free rein to arrest, search, and spy on citizens without judicial warrants, some government officials responded with the line, “You just need to trust us. These powers are only for legitimate investigations [...]

Via Reporters sans frontières:
(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of arrested human rights activist Ibrahim Zoro, who regularly posts material on foreign-based opposition websites. It noted that two other people were in prison in Syria for posting similar material.
It said the state security service, whose agents arrested Zoro on 5 [...]