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| Africa North |
| Rights groups call Egypt 'police state' |
| 2009-12-05 |
| Egypt has become a police state where citizens receive no protection from torture, human rights groups said in a report published yesterday. Picked right up on that, didn't they? "The basic feature of human rights in Egypt today is the prevalence of a policy of exception in which those responsible for violations usually escape punishment amid a climate of impunity intentionally created and fostered for several decades," said the report by 16 Egyptian human rights groups. "With this policy of impunity gradually becoming the norm, the prerogatives of the security apparatus have been expanded and Egypt has turned into a police state," the report said. The rights groups, including the Hesham Mubarak Law Centre and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, have lashed out at the state for its "systematic" use of torture. "Egyptians enjoy no protection against torture -- a systematic, routine practice," they said. "Crimes of torture continue to be an everyday practice in police stations (as well as) prisons and even on public roads." "In many documented cases, torture has resulted in death," despite the Egyptian government insisting they are isolated cases, the groups said. They report said that torture is not limited to political activists but is applied to society's most vulnerable. "Everyone who falls in the grasp of the police, particularly the poor, is in imminent danger of torture and bodily harm inflicted through various means, including beatings, kicks, floggings, burning with cigarettes, sexual harm... electroshocks to the feet, head, sexual organs and breasts, and hanging from iron bars or the door of the cell," the report continued. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Colony - foreigners rule Police State - indigenous rule I know its all so confusing. Like - National Socia!ism and International Socia!ism. The effects at the bottom are the same. It's just the color of the man at the top that changes. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2009-12-05 08:56 |
| #1 When, post Brit rule, was Egypt not a "Police State"? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-12-05 05:13 |