News

US President Barack Obama met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Thursday as he continued his trip to the Middle East.

Amnesty International has documented a series of human rights violations in Egypt. It is particularly concerned about the extension of the state of emergency and the planned new anti-terrorism law, which seeks to grant security forces emergency-style powers.

Counter terrorism continues to be used to justify human rights violations, such as administrative detention lasting in hundreds of cases for more than a decade, prolonged incommunicado and secret detentions, torture an unfair trials before emergency and military courts.

US involvement in these practices has extended to "renditions" by US intelligence services to Egypt, making it a key transit and destination country for the interrogation or indefinite detention and torture of terror suspects.

Amnesty International seeks the establishment of a joint US-Egyptian body to investigate the fate and whereabouts of all those unlawfully transferred to Egypt from US custody. This would pave the way for further investigations into decades of violations in the name of counter terrorism by the Egyptian security forces.