A global human rights group Thursday accused Egypt’s main domestic security agency of harassing and intimidating rights advocates and activists to silence them.
The Amnesty International report was the latest rebuke to Egypt’s government, which faces increasing pressure from the U.S. to improve its human rights record.
The rights group said the National Security Agency was “increasingly using a well-honed pattern of unlawful summons, (and) coercive questioning” of activists in practices amounting to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
The London-based group said it documented how the agency, which handles terror-related and political cases, used such measures to “control the lives” of at least 26 people, including seven women, between 2020 and 2021.
The report is titled: “This will only end when you die,” in reference to what one activist was told of her regular summons to the agency.
Amnesty did not disclose the names of those activists. The NSA is overseen by the Interior Ministry. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has in the past maintained that his country has no political prisoners.
Egypt’s government has in recent years waged a wide-scale crackdown on dissent, jailing thousands of people, mainly Islamists, but also secular activists involved in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Many people have been imprisoned on terrorism charges, for breaking a ban on protests or for disseminating false news.
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