This article is from Human Rights Watch (HRW):

French President Emmanuel Macron should strongly press Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to address human rights violations before his upcoming visit to Paris, particularly to release arbitrarily detained activists and human rights defenders, 17 organizations said today.

President al-Sisi is scheduled to arrive in Paris on December 7, 2020, for a two-day visit, just three weeks after his government’s security agencies cracked down on the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), one of the last remaining independent human rights organizations in the country, arresting three of its directors. The arrests were apparently in direct retaliation for the EIPR meeting with foreign diplomats, including the French mission in Cairo, in early November. Egypt has also arbitrarily detained Ramy Shaath, a prominent Egyptian-Palestinian human rights defender married to a French national, for over a year without trial.

French diplomacy has, at the highest levels, long indulged President al-Sisi’s brutal repression of any form of dissent. It is now or never for President Macron to stand up for his self-declared commitment to promote human rights in Egypt.

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