On the occasion of the anniversary of U.S. President Obama’s Cairo Speech and the upcoming elections in Egypt, the Arab Middle East and the North America offices of the Heinrich Böll Foundation invited together with the Cairo Institute for Human Rights a delegation of human right activists from the Middle East. The delegation visited Washington, DC from June 28th to July 1st, to bring attention to the human rights situation in their home countries. The delegation came from Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The delegation met with U.S. representatives, participated in a public event and had two media appointments.
The delgation included:
Bahey Eldin Hassan, General Director, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
Amal Basha, President, Sister's Arab Forum for Human Rights, Yemen
Ibrahim Almugaiteeb, Director, Human Rights First Society, Saudi Arabia
Kamel Jendoubi, Director, Tunisian Committee for the Respect of Human Rights
Radwan Ziadeh, President, Damascus Center for Human Rights
Saif Nasrawy, Human rights activist and Journalist, Egypt/Iraq
Bassem Samir, Executive Director, Egyptian Democratic Academy
Kamel Laibidi, Tunisian journalist
Radya Nasrawy, President, Tunisian Association against Torture
For further details please follow the links below:
- The delegates' biographies
- The public event with two leading Arab human rights advocates - Bahey El Din Hassan of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies and Amal Basha of the Sisters' Arab Forum for Human Rights in Yemen. They discussed the human rights situation in the region and their perceptions of U.S. policies in this public event. Their discussant partners were Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Tamara Cofman Wittes at the July 1 event cosponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment. To read the full article and to access the event's audio and video files please click here
- Media appointment with Deutsche Welle;see the article (in German only); for the audio file scroll down to the bottom of the page
- Media appointment with Al Hurra TV: Human Rights activists Amal Basha, Bahey Eldin Hassan, Ibrahim Almugaiteeb and Saif Nasrawi are featured in the weekly program "Eye on Democracy" on Al-Hurra. Each week “Eye on Democracy” highlights the most important issues challenging freedom and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. The show is hostd by Mohamed Alyahyai. Click here to watch the interview (in Arabic only)
- Publications on the human rights situation in the Middle East: 1. Almugaiteeb, Ibrahim (2010). Human Rights in Saudi Arabia - Current Conditions (5 pages, pdf, 490KB,) and 2. Ziadeh, Radwan (2010). Serious and Systematic Human Rights Violations in Syria (7 pages, pdf, 370KB)