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Egypt received 165 recommendations following its first review in 2010.

20 recommendations that dealt with the status of civil society organisations in Egypt and called for a revision of the current law

in line with provisions set out in the constitution and “international norms”.

Seven Egyptian NGOs refused to participate in the UN UPR, citing a fear of reprisals by the Egyptian government.

13 times among the 300 recommendations, with calls to amend the law and “bring it in line with international standards

Egypt was urged to ratify international conventions on the death penalty.

no international consensus on the death penalty

50 countr

ies” still have death as a punishment within their criminal justice systems.

Iceland read “Ensure thorough, independent and impartial investigations into the mass killings in [Rabaa Al-Adaweya] Square in 2013 and hold the perpetrators accountable

The US also recommended that Egypt “release those detained solely for exercising rights to freedom of expression or for membership in a political group, and ensure remaining detainees full fair trial guarantees on an individual level”.

included recommendations to tackle corruption, human trafficking, the promotion of human rights, and investment in education for young people.

UN human rights representatives

not to participate in the review.

“the appalling deterioration in the state of human rights in Egypt”.

decided

“reconsider its policies and orientation before Egypt slides into an abyss of unremitting terrorism and political violence”.

Egypt has until March 2015 to respond to the recommendations

hero and a national treasure in the eyes of Egyptians.

Women saw her as an inspiration in their struggle for equal rights

women followed her exam

women

Egyptian women made advances in equality throughout the period of the monarchy

22 Arab countries for discrimination in law, sexual harassment and the paucity of female political representation

Gamal Abdel Nasser, women continued to advance, achieving positions in universities, Parliament and the senior judiciary.

Egypt’s tradition of moderate Islam recognized women’s rights and encouraged women to study and work.

promote female genital mutilation

woman’s job is to please her husband and provide offspring.

cover her body completely and may not study,

women started to wear the

cannot even leave the house without her husband’s permission.

control women’s sexuality.

Wahhabism has influenced all Islamic societies and movements, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

many Egyptian women still went without head scarves, wearing modern Western-style dress, yet incidents of sexual harassment were rare. Now, with the spread of the hijab, harassm

hijab

83 percent of women interviewed had been subjected to sexual harassment at least once, and that 50 percent experienced it on a daily basis.

When ultraconservative doctrine dehumanizes women, reducing them to objects, it legitimizes acts of sexual aggression against them.

until 2005 that sexual harassment became an organized form of retribution against Egyptian women

The security apparatus paid thugs, known as “beltagiya,” to gang up on a woman attending a demonstration, tear off her clothes and molest her.

Dec. 17, 201

Tahrir Square in Cairo, soldiers pulled a female protester’s clothes off and dragged her along the ground, stomping on her with their boots

victim of the attack became an icon for Egyptian women

mocked the victim, blaming her for not staying

During the revolution, millions of Egyptian women went out and bravely faced snipers’ bullets

in the home

10 female members of Parliament out of a total of 508

President Mohamed Morsi’s later attempt to rewrite the Egyptian Constitution would also have removed the only female judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court.

They tried to overturn the law punishing doctors who carried out female genital mutilation, and refused to consider the marriage of minors as a form of human trafficking by claiming that Islam permitted a girl as young as 10 years old to be married.

The revolutionaries are fighting for equality

trying to strip women of their political and social rights and make them subject to men’s autho

rity.

epresents a future that no one can prevent.

hift the narrative

not just

reach a wide audience

outine struggles of life in Cairo.

hree political factions

epresent Egypt speak with one voice.

ndeel and Anwa

launched an alt-comics zine called Tok Tok,

Egyptian millennials.

his powerlessness and his complicity in state-sponsored violence.

“‘This is a stupid regime that is in control right now,’”

cartoons

Morsi overstepped

We all knew this was going to happen,”

everyone realized that the army was planning something.”

Mocking the armed forces has been taboo

since

President Gamal Abdul Nasser

Andeel wrote about the anthem for Mada Masr,

military was asked by the people to rise up against Morsi.

implies

“Bless your hands”

77-year-old Moustafa Hussein serve

baseline for the nationalist narrative.

executive stained with blood

youth of the revolution have come to support a new authoritarianism.

underlining

“I would have had to very intensely water down my language, be way more patient and pragmatic to deliver my message.”

dozens of cartoons

ortraying the Muslim Brotherhood as violent, activating the terrorist trope

“The most important thing to me are regular people,”

“Winter After the Protest Law.”

everyone is at risk when authorities arbitrarily crack down on public demonstrations.

torture inside the prisons

December 2013, 21 young women were handed prison sentences ranging from 11 to 15 years for assembling on a street in Alexandria.

Egypt was handed 300 recommendations by 121 member states

While we have four years to address the recommendations given during the session, we will amend the laws as soon as a new parliament is voted in

parliamentary elections by March 2015.

Women’s rights activists reacted to the interview with dismay.

"The statement by the head of Egypt's National Council for Woman, Mervat El-Tallawy, comes as a huge disappointment from a woman who has presented herself throughout her career as a defender of Women's rights,”

“Her views represent a serious blow to any hopes that the regime in Egypt will reconsider its oppressive policies against peaceful protesters and NGOs, in line with the recent recommendations made at the UN human rights review

Libya looked like the latest fragile blossoming of the Arab spring

Army commanders, mostly of Arab Bedouin origin, refused orders to shoot the protesters

the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya

Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control

In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.

Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya

he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.

militia leaders were already ensconced in the capital’s prime properties

The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.

Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside

The Homeland party, founded by Abdel Hakim Belhad

tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi

The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered

He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes

which might have given militiamen jobs

Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks

the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.

In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.

In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity

The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote

Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.

Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before

Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east

Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government

So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.

The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.

Libya Dawn controls the bulk of the territory and probably has more fighters at its disposal.

General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry

the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam

Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers

Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists

threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.

Yusuf Dawar

The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset

And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies

ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.

Oil production has fallen and become much more volatile

oil is worth half as much as it was a year ago

The Central Bank is now spending at three times the rate that it is taking in oil money

The bank is committed to neutrality, but is based in Tripoli

Tripoli may have a little more access to cash, but is in bad shape in other ways

Fuel supplies and electricity are petering out

Crime is rising; carjacking street gangs post their ransom demands on Twitter

In Fashloum

residents briefly erected barricades to keep out a brigade of Islamists, the Nuwassi

“No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang” reads the roadside graffiti

Libya’s ungoverned spaces are growing,

Each month 10,000 migrants set sail for Europe

On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint

The conflict is as likely to spread as to burn itself out.

the Western powers

have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines

Obama washed his hands of Libya after Islamists killed his ambassador

Italy, the former colonial power, is the last country to have a functioning embassy in Tripoli.

Even under Qaddafi the country did not feel so cut off

Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms

The UAE’s Gulf rival, Qatar, and Turkey have backed the Islamists and Misratans in the west

If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table

Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west

The old divisions still matter

the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army

Tensions between those tribes and Islamist militias ran high from the start.

July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.

In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support

Port cities started to claim self-government and set up their own border controls.

Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world

opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council

Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.

In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.