Interview with Tarek Khater, President of AHRLA (Association for Human Rights Legal Aid)

Have you, and your colleagues from your organization, been under pressure? What kind of pressure?
We certainly have been exposed to many different kinds of pressure. For example, some security people contacted us and questioned our activities especially concerning torture issues. Finally, in 2006 we were informed and pressed to give up a torture case; a police officer was accused of torturing a citizen called Mohammed Abdel Kader to death. The victim’s family, his wife and children, were under severe pressure and coercion to give up their submission of compensation at the court. However, despite all the pressure, the AHRLA’s lawyer made the family court resume their case, considering the fact that the family gave up their right under pressure... All hard working human rights organizations have been continuously exposed to pressure in Egypt, due to their services and involvements with the victims’ violation cases.
 
Are all the civil society organizations under such pressure or only some of them, and especially the ones who care about human rights?
Not all human rights organizations are under such pressure. Only the serious ones which work hard in helping citizens get their rights that have been violated by the responsible officials.
There are 22,000 community-based institutions and institutions registered in Egypt, 50 are human rights organisations (which is a very small number), only 7 to 8 of them are under hard pressure.
 
Do you have the impression that freedom of association is improving in Egypt, or it is worsening very much?
The right to organisation and association is one of the fundamental human rights principles. If we say that the human rights situation is getting worse in Egypt, we would answer this question implicitly. Thus, freedom of organisation and association  is in a very bad condition. The state, the government and the minister in charge of associations have drafted a law which would soon be issued in the next few months. This law, which regulates the freedom of community-based work is worse than the current law. It has many restrictions; it limits both the geographical domain for a certain association and the number of its activities. If an association wants to carry out a certain activity, but this activity has been licensed to another association within the same geographical domain, then it can not do it. We believe that things would be much worse than now.
 
 Your organization has been shut down by the authorities, how do you think you will be able to carry on with your work and activities in the human rights field in spite of that?
In fact, we have taken already a decision. Our organization and its members have been harshly harassed by the authoritiesfor years. Both the administration and the government did not accept very often the results of our democratic elections of both our administrative board and it members. So, we knew that the Egyptian government would close down our organization one day, however, we did not expect it to be now.
We have called our organisation the national aid group for human rights, it is a law firm and it is registered at the Egyptian lawyers’ unit. We will complete the registration procedure after the Eid.
Interview carried out in December 2007