We offer foreign reporters all help they need: SIS head

CAIRO – 13 March 2018: Egypt offers all of the necessary and needed facilities for the national and international journalists to do their work easily and freely in Egypt, including the BBC reporters, said Diaa Rashwan, head of the State Information Service (SIS), on Tuesday.

During a press conference held March 13 to discuses Egypt’s voluntarily biannual report regarding its human rights efforts to the U.N. High Commissioner, Rashwan said that BBC’s last controversial report about Egypt included a lot of lies; however, they still receive all the information they need for their reporting. “It’s true that we called experts and readers to avoid dealing with the British-owned organization, but we won’t hold any information they need to practice their work within the country,” he added.

Rashwan also said that right of opinion and thoughts were never something to be given to someone by another. “It’s a constitutional and essential right,” he said.

Another conference is expected to be held soon to tackle reporters’ conditions in Egypt, according to the SIS head's remarks. About 60,000 journalists are working within Egypt, but not all of them are registered at the journalism syndicate as credible members.

On March 9, Minister of Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Omar Marwan submitted Egypt’s voluntarily biannual report regarding its human rights efforts to the U.N. High Commissioner.

Several issues were tackled by Marwan in the report, including Egypt’s latest efforts in fighting terrorism and extremism, combating illegal immigration and human trafficking, civil and political rights in Egypt, social and cultural rights, and respecting and empowering women within the society.

Earlier in March, Rashwan received at his office BBC Cairo bureau’s chief, Safaa Faisal, to hand her the SIS’s official objection of BBC’s report, published on February 24 under the title “The Shadow over Egypt”.

The BBC report showed an Egyptian woman named Mona Mahmoud Ahmed, also known as Zubeida’s mother, accusing the police of kidnapping her daughter. In a TV interview conducted by renowned anchor Amr Adib, Zubeida refuted claims about her "forced disappearance".