Egypt: Joint Letter - United States Should Condemn Egypt's Silencing of Human Rights Defenders

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We, the undersigned groups, are appalled by evidence that the Egyptian government and intelligence apparatus persist in efforts to silence human rights defenders even beyond Egypt's borders. We call on the U.S. government to condemn these actions.

According to Politico, during a June visit to Washington, D.C., the head of Egypt's General Intelligence Services, Abbas Kamel, demanded that U.S. officials imprison American human rights defender Mohamed Soltan. Circulating a vaguely worded Egyptian document without legal force, Kamel claimed that the United States had agreed that Soltan would serve the rest of a life sentence that he had unjustly received in Egypt in a U.S. prison. Soltan had been arbitrarily arrested in Egypt in 2013, subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, and convicted in a grossly unfair trial; the Obama administration negotiated his release and return to the United States in 2015.

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