UN Secretary General’s Egypt Opportunity

02/11/2017 06:46 pm ET

U.N. Secretary Anontio Guterres visits Egypt this week.

Brian Dooley Director, Human Rights Defenders at Human Rights First

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In a bold move, the new United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is visiting six fundamentally troubled, authoritarian countries in the middle east this week.

His first official tour of the region includes Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Egypt.

The four Gulf countries are run by autocratic monarchs, while the regimes in Turkey and Egypt have become increasingly dictatorial. The Secretary General should tell them rule by fear isn’t sustainable in the long term and brings instability to a region already in turmoil.

Guterres understands what it’s like to live under repression. Until his mid-20s he grew up under authoritarian rule in Portugal until the 1974 revolution ended the dictatorship there. A career as a socialist politician led to his becoming Prime Minister of Portugal, followed by 10 years as U.N. high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

What Guterres says publicly during his trip countries will be closely scrutinized, not least in Egypt, where the attack on human rights is intensifying. On Thursday Egyptian police closed down the world-renown El-Nadeem Centre in Cairo, whose services include providing rehabilitation to survivors of torture.

Guterres is also due to meet Egyptian President Sisi, Prime Minister Sherif Ismail and Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. Their government is suffocating all forms of peaceful dissent. Last week too the Egyptian authorities put more than 1500 people on a “terror list” for alleged association with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Leading human rights lawyers and other dissidents are routinely disappeared, jailed, forced out of the country, put under travel bans, charged with being funded from abroad, or otherwise harassed through the courts. Last month, when prominent activist Ahmed Maher was released after three years in prison for attending a protest, he discovered he has to spend 12 hours every night for the next three years in a police station. So did activist Mohamed Adel on his release two weeks later, effectively adding a further 18 months to their sentences.

Guterres knows all this of course, and how the Sisi regime is ruling by fear. The question is what he intends to do or say about it. The Secretary General is said to be considering giving a speech at Cairo University next week, an event which would readily evoke comparisons with President Obama’s famous address there in June 2009.

When Obama spoke at the university, Egypt’s apparently unshakable dictator President Mubarak actually only had 19 more months in power before being forced from office by street protests six years ago today.

What Obama said then about democracy must have made him, and the neighboring autocrats, shift a little uneasily, as they heard the American president declare the importance of “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose … governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure”.

Guterres has a golden opportunity in Cairo to stake out what the international community expects from Egypt, how the country can be steered towards stability through democracy, and what the U.N. is prepared to do to help that.

The release of political prisoners, allowing civil society to breath and safely grow, and a return to the rule of law would be an important start. Obama had it right in Cairo when he said “you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party”.

Much has happened since then, not least in Cairo and Washington. It’s difficult to imagine such rhetoric from the new American president. All the more reason that Guterres should use his platform to tell the Egyptian government some home truths, remind the people of Egypt he knows what it’s like to live under a dictatorship, and assure them the world has not abandoned them.