WATANI International
23 October 2011
Last week, the rights activist Mohamed Mounir Megahed of Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination, handed in his resignation from the Cabinet’s National Justice Committee. The Committee was founded last May following the vicious attack against Imbaba Copts, which left 15 dead and 340 injured. It was tasked with monitoring sectarian tensions and proposing measures to contain them. Dr Megahed handed his resignation to Committee head, Seif Abdel-Fattah, expressed his rejection of what he described as the “poor” performance of the Committee which includes among its ranks the most prominent advocates of citizenship rights on the Egyptian scene. To name but a few, there are George Ishaq, Amr Hamzawy, Hanna Greiss, and Megahed.
To date, Dr Megahed noted, and despite a Cabinet approval on 11 May 2011, no official decree has been issued to establish the Committee—prompting one member, Dr Megahed said, to call for turning it into a non-governmental organisation.
“As much as I was happy and honoured at your invitation for me to join the Committee a month ago,” Dr Megahed wrote in his resignation, “I am now exceedingly worried about the performance of the committee.
“I have attended three sessions,” Dr Megahed noted, “during which the Committee never once dealt seriously with any sectarian problem, especially in case of the recent case of the Merinab Church in Edfu, Aswan, Upper Egypt. The most disastrous, however, was the urgent meeting convened on 10 October, the day after the massacre against the Copts in Maspero.
“The Committee members had to wait for you for a full hour to show up,” Megahed reminded. “But you neither showed up nor apologised. Many of us had to finally leave, angry at the disregard and disrespect of the Committee members.
“In the wake of the Maspero massacre, the Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf, announced his intention to issue a decree for a law that would criminalise discrimination, and another one for a unified law of places of worship. This was done without going back to the National Justice Committee, the legislative body that should have taken action regarding these bills.
“This implies that the Cabinet has decided to use the Committee as a vehicle to pass unstudied decisions. The Cabinet has failed to deal with the rampant sectarian violence that feeds upon the government’s feebleness, and persists in the disgraceful practice of resolving sectarian conflict through the ‘reconciliation sessions’ that force the victims to relinquish their rights. This, in turn, encourages the recurrence of sectarian crimes, since criminals are assured they will get away with their crimes.”
In view of all these reasons, Dr Megahed said, he could not go on with his committee membership. “I decided to hand in my resignation to you, Mr Abdel-Fattah, since you are the one who invited me to join. I could not hand it to the PM, who so far issued no decree to establish the Committee in the first place.”