Civil Society Organizations Question GANHRI's Continued "A Status" Accreditation for Egypt's National Human Rights Council - Joint Statement

The undersigned human rights organizations express deep concern regarding the decision to maintain "A status" accreditation for Egypt's National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) following the 2025 review conducted by the Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA) of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI).

The 2025 decision appears to rest significantly on confidential draft legislative amendments submitted by the NCHR but never disclosed to the public or subjected to consultation with independent civil society actors. Basing accreditation on unpublished and hypothetical reforms represents a fundamental departure from GANHRI's evidence-based methodology and threatens the integrity of the entire accreditation framework.

The signatory organizations underscore that maintaining "A status" accreditation for an NHRI whose independence remains compromised and whose effectiveness is not evidenced by its record risks undermining the Paris Principles and eroding confidence in the GANHRI accreditation framework. The legitimacy of the accreditation system depends fundamentally on transparency in decision-making, consistency in the application of standards, and rigorous adherence to objective, evidence-based assessment. We reaffirm our commitment to constructive engagement with GANHRI and the SCA while emphasizing that credibility requires accreditation decisions grounded in demonstrated institutional performance, not anticipated reforms.

Our organizations continue to document persistent legal and institutional deficiencies that remain unaddressed, including legal constraints on NCHR’s independence; Article 3(8) of law No. 197/2017 mandates that the NCHR's cooperation with international organizations must be coordinated through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a requirement fundamentally inconsistent with the operational independence required by the Paris Principles.

As for the effectiveness of Egypt’s NCHR, civil society documentation reveals that hundreds of complaints concerning enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, torture, and inhuman detention conditions have been submitted to the NCHR without meaningful follow-up. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, organizations monitored at least 10 deaths in custody, 15 incidents of torture, and 44 cases of medical negligence. The NCHR has remained conspicuously silent on these patterns, as well as on high-profile cases including the arbitrary detention and alleged torture of individuals accused under State Security Cases No. 2036/2023 and No. 717/2024 for criticizing economic policies, and the "rotation detention" of woman human rights defender Hoda Abdel Monem, immediately re-arrested upon completing a five-year sentence in October 2023.

While the NCHR possesses the authority to visit detention facilities, it cannot conduct unannounced visits as recommended by the SCA's General Observations. Moreover, the Council's detention monitoring has declined precipitously from 10 prison visits in 2022 to only 2 in 2023, with zero visits recorded in the first quarter of 2024. The limited visits conducted yielded minimal substantive recommendations and failed to address documented patterns of abuse.

The Council has also declined to engage with civil society criticism of Egypt's National Human Rights Strategy (2021) or with evidence of abuses in facilities such as Badr III Prison, where detainees face prolonged visitation bans, 24-hour surveillance, and denial of basic necessities. In 2020, the NCHR rejected the UN Committee against Torture's finding that torture is systematic in Egypt, describing it as a "politicized categorization."

The NCHR's report on the December 2023 presidential elections praised the process's integrity while ignoring extensively documented violations during the endorsement collection phase, including forced collection of national IDs, physical assaults on supporters of opposition candidates Ahmed Tantawy and Gamila Ismail, systematic obstruction of endorsement registration, deployment of Predator spyware against Tantawy's communications, and the arrest of at least 128 of his campaign members between September and October 2023. A senior NCHR member publicly claimed the Council received no election-related complaints, a statement contradicted by substantial documentation.

The signatory organizations emphasize that UN treaty bodies have repeatedly raised concerns about the NCHR's independence and effectiveness. We note the stark inconsistency between the SCA's September 2023 decision to defer reaccreditation, which signaled that a downgrade would be warranted absent concrete reforms and the 2025 decision to maintain "A status" despite no observable changes in the NCHR's legal framework, operational independence, or protection mandate implementation.

In light of these substantive concerns, the signatory organizations call on GANHRI and the SCA to:

1. Publish the complete reasoning and evidentiary basis for the 2025 accreditation decision, including any reliance on unpublished legislative amendments;

2. Ensure meaningful consultation with independent Egyptian and international civil society organizations in all future accreditation reviews;

3. Schedule a comprehensive review in 2027 to assess whether promised legislative amendments have been enacted and whether the NCHR's operational practices demonstrate substantive compliance with the Paris Principles.

Signatories:

• Egyptian Front for Human Rights

• Law and Democracy Support Foundation (LDSF)

• Egyptian Human Rights Forum ( EHRF)

• EgyptWide for Human Rights

• Sinai Foundation for Human Rights 

• El Nadim Center 

• Committee for Justice

• Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies