West not addressing Egypt human rights issues: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Hazem Salem, an activist and political commentator in Cairo, about Human Rights Watch censuring the Egyptian police over the detention and torture of 20 anti-government protesters.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: This revelation by Human Rights Watch is nothing new. Let’s not forget many Egyptians have died in custody over the past years ever since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi. Tell us a bit more about what the situation is like.

Salem: This is a sample of a whole systematic situation that has been there. Torture has been a kind of a disciplinary part of the work of the police for a very long time not only recently but throughout decades so far. Yet the situation is that there is some kind of hesitance among the international human rights groups to deal with every situation of human rights abuse.

Sometimes the criteria is modified in a certain way so only the very grave brutality is reported or the mass-scale brutality is reported but there are many cases that are not reported in the international human rights groups and internally inside Egypt that the human rights groups are facing a huge crackdown now and the whole civil society and the civil society organizations especially the ones specialized on human rights are facing a lot of harassment by the authorities; and also claims of international foreign funding that is being abused to formulate wrong reports.

Still the real problem is the governments of the West, especially the United States, France, Britain and even Germany that are not making human rights issue as an issue with the Egyptian regime because of certain political and economic interests, the latest of which were the visits by officials from Germany and the French president where the human rights issue was sidelined in favor of certain economic contracts, and this is the way off that the regime is selling to the West - I give you economic interests if you put away the issue of human rights. That is why the abuses will continue and will be more grave in the future.

Press TV: So basically what you are saying is that we are going to see a worsening of the human rights situation in Egypt for as long as the West continues to provide incentives to the current government to continue this way?

Salem: That is true and this is not new for this Egyptian regime. There [have] been also regimes in Latin America and elsewhere that the world and the Western world [have] favored despite the human rights abuses. There are comparisons between the current regime in Egypt and that of Pinochet, which was favored by the US for a long time because it was serving its interests.

So the situation of this kind needs to address the people in the West and the people of conscience, people of real moral in the West, to put these governments accountable especially with Panama Reports and this kind of thing that shows how corrupt the Western political regimes are.

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