Human Rights Activists in Egypt: Between Commitment to the Universality of Human Rights and the Challenges of a Particular Reality

Bosmat Yafet-Avshalom

The establishment of the Egyptian Human Rights Organization in 1985 marks the beginning of the growth of the human rights movement in Egypt. Since then, the movement has grown in quantity as well as quality, and has established its position as an opposition force at the forefront of the struggle for the expansion of liberties. Human rights organizations that have succeeded in placing human rights issues on the public agenda have encountered difficulties in turning the human rights discourse into an inherent part of the local culture.
This article examines the concepts of human rights activists in Egypt and the manner in which they cope with the existence of gaps between the universal message of human rights and local and particular interpretations, whether these are based on local religion, culture or customs or whether they are a product of the desire of Mubarak's regime for a selective interpretation of the discourse, which would preserve its power and control.
The article shows that the difficulty in expanding the cultural and social legitimacy of human rights is related in part to the adherence of these human rights organizations to the universal discourse of human rights and the absence of a systematic and consistent effort on their part to develop a unique discourse associated with their Arab-Islamic culture and the regional context. In practice, most of the organizations concentrated on human rights violations produced by the policies of the Egyptian government and chose to ignore the cultural context, also an essential element in human rights violations. This choice was manifest most clearly in the manner in which violations of the rights of the Coptic minority were dealt with which did not include direct references to the religious foundations of the discrimination suffered by it. This omission indirectly contributed to the reproduction of the hegemonic discourse, whether the regime's, which denied the very existence of discrimination, or the Islamist groups, whose engagement with this minority is anchored in the concepts of ahl al-dhimma.