By POMED
Egyptian authorities shut down the El-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence and Torture today after police sealed off its entrance with wax and arrested the doorman, according to a statement [Ar] published by the Center on Twitter. The El-Nadeem Center is a human rights organization that documents human rights abuses and treats torture victims.
The Egyptian government has attempted to crack down on the El-Nadeem Center multiple times over the past year. In February and April 2016, authorities tried to shut down the Center arbitrarily, but the order was challenged and El-Nadeem continued to operate. In November 2016, El-Nadeem’s assets were frozen temporarily pending its official registration as an NGO. That same month, one of the Center’s co-founders, Seif Eldawla, was banned from leaving the country to attend a conference. The Center is among the dozens of rights NGOs targeted by the Egyptian government in its ongoing crackdown against civil society.
Ziad Abdel Tawab, Deputy Director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, posted on Facebook that “sealing El-Nadeem exposes thousands of victims of violence and torture in Egypt and is leaving them without remedy.” On Twitter, Mai El-Sadany, a legal analyst and nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, expressed that today is “a sad day for human rights [and] for Egypt.” El-Sadany also pointed out that the El-Nadeem Center published new statistics related to human rights violations in Egypt earlier this week.
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