The crackdown on dissent in Egypt is so massive, the authorities won’t even say how many people they’ve arrested.

Maybe authorities are afraid that if they reveal the real number of detainees caught up in the sweeps of perceived or actual dissidents, then outrage against the regime would only deepen?

Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, authorities have extensively used pretrial detention, particularly in politicized cases, to keep tens of thousands of people in jail without trial. But without the government releasing the data, that’s only an estimate of the tremendous scale of the problem.

What’s known is the huge crackdown has led to dangerous overcrowding in detention centers, undermining already inhumane conditions.

The government has been building new prisons to deal with all the people they are wrongfully arresting. However, systematic abuses of prisoners’ rights have been extensively documented in new prisons as well as the old ones.

Common complaints in many prisons include the lack of humane sleeping and sanitation arrangements. Prison authorities routinely deprive inmates of access to health care, as well as visits by families and lawyers.

Apart from a few military prisons under the Defense Ministry, all official prisons in Egypt are administered by the Interior Ministry, under its Prison Authority or other departments. Thousands are also held in police stations as well as many unofficial and secret detention sites run by the National Security Agency, which has a long record of torture and other abuses.

No independent groups are allowed to visit detention sites, and no independent authority exists to monitor prisons and investigate allegations of ill-treatment.

Egyptian authorities frequently release videos about new detention facilities, as if to highlight how many more people they can imprison.

But how many are already locked up? They refuse to say.

It looks like the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is up to its old dirty tricks.

A journalist recently revealed the FBI paid an informant US$20,000 to infiltrate Denver’s racial justice movement and incite violence in 2020.

After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, anti-racism demonstrations spread across the country and around the world, demanding urgent police reform.

The informant deceived his way into becoming an organizer of anti-racism protests in Denver, Colorado. Under FBI supervision, he encouraged violence and tried to get activists to commit crimes.

For those who supported the protests after the police killing of George Floyd, this news is enraging.

But even those who didn’t get involved should be disturbed that US taxpayers are paying for their government to incite violence against US citizens.

These FBI’s tactics are not new. Similar ploys were used against anti-war, Native American, and black activists, at least since the 1960s, as well as against Muslim Americans since 9/11.

Freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom from racial discrimination are all fundamental human rights. These are pillars of democracy.

The people exercising these freedoms should be protected and not undermined through infiltration by their own government.

Just about everything the authorities do in Belarus screams “dictatorship” but perhaps nothing as loudly as this: a court in Minsk has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to ten years in prison.

The case involving three human rights defenders from Viasna, a leading civil society organization in Belarus, was politically motivated from the beginning.

Along with Bialiatski, Viasna’s leader, his deputy Valiantsin Stefanovich got nine years, and Uladzimir Labkovich, Viasna’s lawyer, got eight.

The verdicts were a straightforward reprisal for their efforts to protect fundamental human rights in Belarus.

In fact, the bogus sentences with brutal prison terms were handed down for pretty much the same reason the Nobel folks awarded the Peace Prize: defending human rights against lawless authorities.

But while praised abroad, such courage and decency are precisely what the regime won’t tolerate.

(compiled by Lisa Maier)  

• Nicaragua: UN Rights Council should renew experts’ mandate (HRW) 
• Several people killed in new Azerbaijan-Armenia clash in Nagorno-Karabakh (Al Jazeera) 
• A’i Cofán Indigenous leader’s killing in Ecuador demands thorough investigation (HRW) 
• Thousands without shelter after fire at Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh (The Guardian) 

Today, all of us at Human Rights Watch – and other human rights activists around the world – are mourning Judy Heumann, the pioneering disability rights activist who died on Saturday, age 75.

Heumann’s lifelong activism supporting the rights of people with disabilities in the United States and around the world was extraordinary. 

My colleague and HRW’s disability rights director Shantha Rau Barriga, called Heumann, “a true force of nature – a visionary leader, fierce advocate, a trailblazer.”

Indeed, her life was inspiring.

From a young age, Heumann, who contracted polio in 1949, had to fight against stigma and exclusion. At age five in Brooklyn, New York, she was denied the chance to go to her local school because her inability to walk was deemed “a fire hazard.” She was instead given home instruction twice a week, for less than two hours in total.

After her mother challenged the decision, Heumann was allowed to go to a “special” segregated school for children with disabilities. Following mounting parental pressure, the school system reversed its policy and Heumann joined the local mainstream high school in 1961.

As a young adult, Heumann was denied her teaching license despite passing her oral and written exams in New York State, over concerns she would not be able to assist children in an emergency. She sued the Board of Education and went on to become the first wheelchair user to become a teacher in the state of New York.

In April 1977, Heumann led a 28-day sit-in, the longest in a federal building, to protest the refusal of the US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to sign long-delayed regulations for Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which fought against discrimination and exclusion of people with disabilities. This was not only successful in pressuring the government to adopt the regulations, it also brought together diverse members of the disability community and allies. 

Heumann’s activism was chronicled in the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary “Crip Camp” about young people who spent their summer holidays at Camp Jened in upstate New York. As Heumann said, “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.”

Heumann is considered the founder of the Independent Living Movement and played a key role in advancing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Heumann was also instrumental in ensuring people with disabilities benefitted from international development assistance. She was the World Bank’s first advisor on disability and development, and was appointed by President Barack Obama as the US State Department’s inaugural senior advisor on international disability rights. She served as a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation from 2017 and 2019. 

Since 2018, Heumann also served as co-chair of Human Rights Watch’s Disability Rights Advisory Committee, and joined the Board of Directors in 2020.

Amy Rao, co-chair of the Human Rights Watch board, says, “Judy Heumann’s legacy goes far beyond the groundbreaking impact she had on law and policy empowering people with disabilities. She was a role model for how fierce activism can transform the world, and schooled us on why inclusion matters. She was a legend.”