Free Egyptians Party slams Amnesty International ‘incitement’ against Egypt

CAIRO – 25 September 2019: Head of the Free Egyptians Party Essam Khalil criticized a statement by Amnesty International issued Wednesday addressing human rights situation in Egypt as “an incitement against the Egyptian president and state institutions.”

Khalil described the statement as manifesting repeated “professional lapse” by the international organization, saying that Amnesty International “misleads public opinion.”

“The call for the countries of the world to intervene to stop so called "repression of the President" is a huge failure by the organization,” according to Khalil. "I do not understand how Amnesty International came up with the term repression, and what are it signs? And how this repression happened?”

Khalil further stressed, in a statement issued by his party, that the Egyptian state institutions exercised their right to protect its facilities and citizens. “It is the right guaranteed by the Constitution and the law.”

“The state exercised its right within the legal framework against those who infiltrated and incited violence against state institutions and took legal measures against them with the presence of [the violators’] lawyers in accordance with the relevant international conventions and the provisions of the Egyptian constitution similar to other European countries that witnessed same incidents.”

Khalil said that “Amnesty International's insistence on the use of the term detention is a fraud to the public opinion, pointing there is nothing in the Egyptian law known as detention and that the Egyptian Constitutional Court ruled to abolish the detention from its laws.”

Concluding his remarks, Khalil called on Amnesty International to abide by professional standards and conduct its work impartially when tackling Egypt.