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Egypt: EU overlooked rights violations to speed up €1bn payment, say activists

Campaigners say this is the first time in 30 years that the EU failed to enforce preconditions for an aid package
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi meeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Cairo in March 2024 (AFP)
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi meeting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Cairo in March 2024 (AFP)

The EU made a slew of concessions in order to give Egypt a “clean bill of health on human rights” and ram through an aid package of €1bn to Cairo, rights activists say.

The payout, intended to boost Egypt’s tanking economy, was based on an assessment conducted in October last year, which found that Cairo had taken “credible steps” to address human rights violations relating to pre-trial detention and criminal procedures law.

But rights activists say the assessment was “deliberately misleading” and that the EU made “one concession after another” in order to expedite the payment, in the interests of curbing migration to Europe.

The money comes in the form of macro-financial assistance (MFA), loans given by the EU to partner countries who are already recipients of IMF aid and grappling with a balance payment issue. It is the first of two MFA payouts, amounting to €5bn which will be disbursed over the next three years.

These form part of an unprecedented payout of €7.5bn, a package of loans, grants and energy cooperation deals aimed at sustaining the country and preventing a possible flow of refugees, to be disbursed between 2024 and 2027.

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Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, denounced the assessment as "deeply flawed and deliberately misleading".

“The EU gave Egypt one exception after the next when it came to the human rights component of the agreement,” he told Middle East Eye. 

“This was a promising window...the size of this package is unprecedented in the EU-Egypt association agreement,” he said, referring to the Euro-Mediterranean agreement signed between the EU and Egypt in 2004. 

“And for the first time, these funds are going to Egypt through a mechanism that legally includes a requirement for political preconditions.”

The MFA is the second largest to be paid to any country, after Ukraine, according to Bahgat.

MFA payments require certain preconditions, including “the respect of human rights and effective democratic mechanisms, including a multi-party parliamentary system and the rule of law”. 

While strict benchmarks were set for economic reforms, the commission did not stipulate any for human rights.

‘Concrete and credible steps’

But the commission did not enforce the MFA's preconditions for Egypt.

“This is the first time in 30 years, certainly in the southern Mediterranean, that an MFA is given to a country where the political preconditions have not been met,” Bahgat said.

The EU’s first concession to Egypt was to replace the political preconditions of the agreement with “ex-ante conditionalities”, which the EU defines as “a concrete and pre-defined key factor which is the precondition for an efficient and effective attainment of the specific objective of the relevant union’s investment priority”.

According to Bahgat, this allowed the commission to disburse the money based on “concrete and credible steps” towards the preconditions, rather than having to meet them.

One of the “steps” cited in the assessment was Egypt’s National Dialogue in August 2024, a public consultation on remand detention and criminal procedures law.  

The commission declared that the dialogue “addressed key policy reforms such as on pre-trial detention, criminal procedures law”.

But rights activists, including Bahgat, who were involved in the National Dialogue have denounced this finding as “factually incorrect”, with the dialogue’s trustees issuing a statement saying that many of the recommendations were ignored in the working draft in debate in parliament.

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Furthermore, EU negotiators agreed not to impose any specific benchmarks for human rights reform after facing fierce objections from Egypt.

“They came here and they negotiated very specific macro-economic actions that Egypt would have to take,” Bahgat told MEE. “But for human rights, they decided to stick to that one line [specifying] concrete and credible steps, without any benchmarks.”

“Effectively, they held Egypt to a standard that it was going to meet anyway,” he added.

Another concession was that the money was disbursed without the approval of the European Parliament, with the commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen citing the "urgency" of Egypt’s "rapidly deteriorating economic and fiscal situation".

According to Bahgat, this was a false pretext, as Egypt had already received a $35bn bailout from the UAE and struck an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to augment its current loan programme by $5bn.

“The argument that the €1bn was necessary to save Egypt from defaulting economically was disingenuous,” he said.

"The EU has rendered its own instruments and process non-credible, with the expected result of giving Egypt a clean bill of health on human rights," Bahgat added, noting that Article Two of the EU-Egypt Association agreement stipulates that human rights must form the foundation of the relations.

Bahgat emphasised that the EU's failure to uphold this principle would have real consequences on the ground for Egypt's rights defenders.

"They made our job more difficult and actually caused harm by sending a message to the Egyptian government that it is under no expectation to live up to its constitutional and legal obligations with regard to human rights and that its propaganda is being believed and accepted by its partners in the EU," he said.

A political decision

According to Hussein Baoumi, EU advocacy officer with Amnesty International, the commission’s assessment was destined to fail.

The EU’s decision to rush through the payment, he said, is “political”.

“They need to give Egypt the money for a number of reasons, primarily to advance EU objectives in the Mediterranean,” Baoumi told MEE.

The agreement seeks the adoption of a "holistic approach to migration management", with money earmarked for "immigration programmes", "legal migration routes" and "mobility programmes".

In 2024, Egyptians constituted the fourth-largest group to arrive irregularly in Europe via the central Mediterranean.

The EU has long adopted migration externalisation policies, outsourcing its border policing to non-EU member states in order to curb migration flows to Europe, with funding, equipment and training funnelled via aid packages to third countries.

Rights organisations have highlighted how these policies directly support authorities who are committing serious violations against people on the move.

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Baoumi said that the commission is also pursuing its geopolitical interests in the region, by trying to secure cooperation with southern Mediterranean countries, and ensure that their interests remain aligned with those of the EU.

“The thinking is that by giving the funding, without restrictions…is that these governments will cooperate more on these issues,” Baoumi said. 

Baoumi noted that fears over the re-emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt could also be fuelling the commission’s urgency to push the deal through.

MEP Celine Imart warned in a recent tweet that “political Islam is a real threat” in the Middle East, describing Egypt as a “key piece on the geographical chessboard”.

“Egypt is a model to follow. Free practice of faith for Coptic Christians, considerable development of the place of women in society (no obligation to wear the veil, participation in political life, etc.) and a clear desire to attract investors,” she said.

“Egypt is proud of this! Supporting Egypt means accompanying it in this process and preventing any return of the Muslim Brotherhood as was the case from 2012 to 2013 with Mohamed Morsi. This would be a geostrategic catastrophe.”

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