HUMAN RIGHTS

ANIS MILI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Tunisian security forces stand guard outside a polling location in Ben Arous Governorate, Tunisia, on July 25, 2022.

Hammami was also skeptical that a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would solve the country’s deeply-rooted economic problems. “The IMF’s role is not to deal with micro-economic problems,” he said. While IMF involvement may send a greenlight for other donors to get involved, without Tunisia having a clear, comprehensive economic program, “it’s difficult to see the end of the tunnel regarding the economic situation,” he lamented.

Even though Saied appears to have achieved his political goals, Marks said he is not necessarily in a position of secure power. She believes he is weaker today than he was a year ago, as his actions have caused the opposition to become more united.

“I think Kais Saied’s vanity referendum has given them a point of opposition to rally around,” she said. “There is a lot of broad unity insofar as we’ve seen the opposition—the political elite and the civil society elite—really start to congeal more around this idea that Saied is a dictator, and you can see it today. They are calling the referendum illegitimate and the outcome unreliable.”

Marks criticized Washington’s mostly supportive stance toward Saied’s leadership, but praised the comments by U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price following the referendum. The United States, Price said, has “noted the widespread concerns among many Tunisians regarding the lack of an inclusive and transparent process and limited scope for genuine public debate during the drafting of the new constitution.” —Elaine Pasquini

Egypt’s Use of Indefinite Travel Bans

Much global attention has been placed on the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt, but those facing less severe punishments for challenging the status quo often go unnoticed. On July 28, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) and the Freedom Initiative held a virtual event to note Egypt’s use of travel bans to punish human rights proponents.

Patrick Zaki, an Egyptian human rights advocate and a masters student at the University of Bologna, was released from prison in December 2021 after serving 18 months for “spreading false news.” However, he still faces a travel ban that prevents him from returning to Italy to complete his studies and be with his fiancée. “The travel ban is taking a huge toll on my career,” he explained. “If I’m not able to be in Italy by next September, I might lose my chance to resume my studies and lose my scholarship.”

Zaki has no idea when or if the ban will be lifted, and is thus forced to live in limbo. “The ban is ruining my life,” he explained. “The only dream I had when I was in my [prison] cell was to travel and live my normal life again.”

Mai El-Sadany, managing director and legal and judicial director at TIMEP, noted there’s little those living with bans on foreign travel can do to remedy their situation. To begin with, she explained, most individuals aren’t notified of their ban until they attempt to go abroad. “Almost all Egyptians banned from travel, be they civil society advocates or not, first learn that they’re actually banned at the airport,” she explained. “They’re not told who issued the ban, why it’s been issued, or for how long it may be in place.”

The situation does not get any clearer for the individual once they leave the airport. “After you go home, there’s no one path through which to solicit information about the ban,” she noted. Some bans are issued through a judicial order in reference to a legal case, but many are doled out by the mercurial security apparatus and have no paper trail. Those who do seek answers often have to jump through hoops in the notoriously opaque Egyptian state apparatus and often don’t receive satisfactory answers to their inquiry for months or longer, El-Sadany noted. Travel bans are legally supposed to end after three years, but she said they are typically extended indefinitely.

The government’s use of arbitrary bans is a violation of the Egyptian constitution, El-Sadany pointed out. The constitution “clearly states in no unequivocal terms that no citizen may be banned from leaving state territory except with a casual judicial order for a specified period of time in cases specified by the law,” she noted.

Ultimately, El-Sadany believes public advocacy is the best way to reverse travel bans. “It pains me as a lawyer to say that the most effective way to lift these bans is to create a lot of hell and draw a lot of attention to these cases,” she said.

Karim Ennarah, an Egyptian human rights worker released from prison but living with an indefinite travel ban and asset freeze, said that like Zaki his life is largely

BERND VON JUTRCZENKA/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES Activists donning masks representing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el‐Sisi (c) and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (r) hold a protest in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany on July 18, 2022, calling for the release of Egyptian blogger and political prisoner Alaa Abd el‐Fattah.

on pause. “I’ve had job offers that were withdrawn because of the complications from not being able to travel and not having a bank account,” he noted. He added that many “international organizations don’t want to hire someone who is implicated in a political anti-terror case.” (Many human rights advocates and political prisoners in Egypt are charged under anti-terrorism laws for their peaceful advocacy.)

James Lynch, founding director of FairSquare Research and Projects, said the world needs to do more to advocate for those living with travel bans. Such restrictions typically “fly under the radar,” despite their devastating impact, he noted. “Because they often come as an alternative to—or after—a prison sentence, they are often seen as a less problematic practice.”

Allison McManus, research director at the Freedom Initiative, said Washington specifically could do much more to address the topic. “We have a lot of leverage, we have a gigantic military financing package that we give to Egypt every year,” she noted. “That can be better conditioned around not just releases of prisoners but actually freedom for those who are released, including the lifting of travel bans and asset freezes.” —Dale Sprusansky

Groups Demand Explanation for UAE’s Arrest of American Lawyer

The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) held a press conference on July 28 outside the Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to address the arrest and detainment of U.S. citizen and Virginia-based human rights lawyer Asim Ghafoor by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

While connecting through Dubai International Airport on July 14 en route to a wedding in Turkey, Ghafoor was detained under the pretense of having to take a COVID test, after which he was arrested and transported to Abu Dhabi where he was jailed and denied bail. At the time of his arrest, Ghafoor was not informed of the charges filed against him.

According to a report from the Emirates News Agency (WAM), “The Abu Dhabi Money Laundering Court convicted Ghafoor [in absentia] of committing…two crimes of tax evasion and money laundering related to a tax evasion operation in his country, and sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of three million dirhams ($816,000), with deportation from the UAE.”

In August, a court granted Ghafoor’s release, and he returned home to the U.S. in exchange for paying a $1.4 million fine to the UAE.

The Emiratis claim that they coordinated their investigation of Ghafoor with the U.S. for alleged tax evasion and making suspicious money transfers to the UAE. The U.S. Department of State in a July 18 statement denied any such cooperation.

Ghafoor, who was an attorney for murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was also the co-founder, along with Khashoggi, of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a nonprofit organiza-

STAFF PHOTO P. PASQUINI

(L‐r) Dr. Zahid Bukhari, Robert McCaw, Oussama Jammal, Nihad Awad and Imam Naeem Baig call on the U.S. government to investigate why American citizen Asim Ghafoor was arrested and detained by the UAE.