Activists, Lawyers Call for Transparency in U.S. Funding of Egyptian Military

As the State Department prepares to decide whether Egypt’s military-backed government has earned the release of suspended U.S. aid, human rights advocates are pressing officials not to look away from a crackdown they say has only intensified since the country’s 2013 coup.

A Certification Process With Real Money at Stake

Human Rights Watch delivered a formal letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, urging the department’s aid certification review to acknowledge plainly that Egypt has made no meaningful progress toward basic freedoms or genuine democratic transition — the specific benchmark Congress has attached to continued military assistance. The stakes are considerable: since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s military removed Egypt’s first democratically elected president in July 2013, the ensuing crackdown has killed well over 1,000 protesters and swept more than 16,000 people into detention, according to Human Rights Watch’s own documentation of the period — the vast majority held, the organization argues, for nothing more than peacefully exercising rights to free expression, association, and assembly.

Sarah Leah Whitson, then Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa director, was blunt about what would and wouldn’t satisfy the organization’s standard for genuine reform: “Minor gestures, such as releasing a few high-profile detainees, that don’t address the overwhelming reality of political repression in Egypt would only be cosmetic,” she said, warning that certifying Egypt’s democratic progress “will ring hollow while thousands of opposition activists remain locked up.”

What Real Progress Would Actually Require

Human Rights Watch’s letter didn’t stop at criticism — it laid out concrete steps the organization argued Egypt would need to take to genuinely earn continued U.S. support: releasing political dissidents currently held on charges tied solely to peaceful protest, amending the sweeping public assembly law the government passed in November 2013 that effectively criminalized unauthorized demonstrations, and opening real criminal investigations into security forces’ use of lethal force against protesters and documented abuse of detainees. None of that, as of the letter’s writing, had meaningfully occurred, according to the organization’s assessment.

The pattern of repression extends well beyond Islamist supporters of the ousted government, the kind of crackdown some observers initially assumed might be limited to a specific political faction. Secular activists, dissident academics, and journalists have all been swept into the same expanding net — evidence, human rights lawyers argue, that the crackdown reflects a broader campaign against dissent itself, not a narrowly targeted response to any single political movement.

A History of Aid Suspended, Then Restored

This wasn’t the first time Egypt’s military aid had come under this kind of scrutiny. The Obama administration had already partially suspended aid and canceled joint military exercises in August 2013, directly in response to security forces’ killing of protesters at Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in — a massacre Human Rights Watch would later document in exhaustive detail as one of the largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history, in a report titled “All According to Plan.” The pattern of suspension followed by eventual restoration, contingent on incremental and often superficial gestures rather than structural reform, would recur repeatedly in the years following this specific certification review, with successive administrations balancing human rights conditions against Egypt’s strategic value as a security and counterterrorism partner in the region.

A Test of Whether Conditions Mean Anything

For the activists and lawyers pressing for transparency in this review, the underlying question extends beyond any single certification decision: whether the human rights conditions Congress attaches to military aid function as genuine leverage, or as a formality that gets satisfied by cosmetic gestures whenever strategic considerations make continued funding a foregone conclusion regardless of the facts on the ground. Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who would later spend 22 months imprisoned himself after tweeting at a 2013 demonstration, would go on to describe exactly that dynamic after his own eventual release: proof, he argued, that U.S. pressure genuinely could move Cairo when applied — and a warning that releasing withheld aid too readily surrenders precisely the leverage that pressure depends on.

For related coverage of U.S. foreign policy and human rights conditions, see our piece on the fight to free FSRN’s own contributor Khaled Sid Mohand from Syrian detention, or browse our full International archive.