The show must go on: Unpublished documents confirm ‘violations’ don’t block EU financing

Last week, the European Commission announced the disbursement of 1.5 billion euros to Egypt, the second tranche of a 4 billion loan, following what it called “a positive assessment confirming that Egypt has successfully met the required conditions” for release.

But the Commission’s own briefing document on the tranche, which lays out its assessment of Egypt’s compliance, tells a different story. It is packed with criticism of Egypt’s human rights record. Criticism serious enough to raise the question of whether the disbursement itself breaches the loan agreement’s own terms, which require Egypt to keep “the implementation of concrete and credible steps towards respecting effective democratic mechanisms, including a multi-party parliamentary system, and the rule of law, and guaranteeing respect for human rights”

The unpublished briefing, obtained by Al Manassa, was circulated to the European Parliament and the Council—the body representing EU member states’ heads of government—to update them on the loan, issued under the bloc’s Macro-Financial Assistance mechanism.

The loan is part of a 5 billion euros package of concessional financing to Egypt, within a broader 7.4 billion euros support package the EU approved on March 17, 2024, at the Egypt-EU summit in Cairo; in the middle of Israel’s assault on Gaza, whose disruption of Red Sea shipping had driven down Suez Canal revenues.

The announcement releasing the second tranche drew a joint statement of condemnation from thirteen human rights organizations, which demanded the EU explain why it was disbursing funds despite what they called Egyptian authorities’ “non-compliance with the rules governing this financial support,” accusing the Commission of “bypassing its own rules and providing a financial lifeline to an authoritarian government responsible for systematic repression.”

Two faces of the Commission

In its public statement announcing the second tranche in late July, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, responsible for proposing legislation, implementing policy, and managing the budget, said its assessment found that Egypt had “successfully met the conditions required for the release of the second installment.

These conditions include implementation of the agreed economic policy reforms, continued progress on the IMF program, and fulfillment of the political requirements set out in the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the EU and Egypt.”

The details of that political and human-rights component—absent from the public statement—appear at length in the unpublished document: criticism of ongoing torture, enforced disappearance, poor detention conditions, worsening conditions for refugees and migrants, security sweeps targeting them, the detention of journalists, and the continued absence of legislation criminalizing violence against women.

For Samar El-Hussieny, executive director of the Egyptian Front for Human Rights, this contradiction reveals that the briefing document has become “nothing more than a bureaucratic formality: necessary only to complete the paperwork for a tranche the Commission appears to have decided to release from the outset.”

El-Hussieny attributes the decision to the EU’s interest in staying on Egypt’s good side, particularly in light of “new European legislation permitting the return of asylum seekers to a ‘safe third country’ they passed through en route to Europe…Egypt being a candidate for that designation. This raises the stakes of the relationship considerably: Egypt would no longer function only as a barrier holding migrants back from Europe, but as a destination for their resettlement.”

Mohamed Abdel Salam, executive director of the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, agrees, pointing to what the Egyptian government has come to represent for the EU “across a number of geopolitical files. Chiefly its role in blocking migration toward Europe, along with converging positions on the war in Gaza, including opposition to forced displacement,” he told Al Manassa.

Al Manassa reached out to the European Commission for comment but had not received a response by the time of publication.

They call it “challenges”

According to the document, the Commission holds that Egypt faces “significant challenges” in democracy, the rule of law, and human rights as well as in ensuring accountability for violations. “Arbitrary detention, poor detention conditions, the absence of unannounced monitoring visits to detention facilities, torture, enforced disappearance, and pressure on human rights defenders” all remain ongoing practices, the document states.

It also criticizes the deteriorating situation of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Egypt, “amid arbitrary arrest campaigns primarily targeting Sudanese and Syrian nationals during the first quarter of 2026,” estimating that between 5,000 and 10,000 refugees and asylum seekers were detained by authorities.

Against the Commission’s account of deteriorating conditions, the Egyptian government has repeatedly denied conducting mass arrests. In a December letter to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, it described individual detentions as “temporary precautionary measures the purpose of which is to verify the identity of the persons concerned and to combat migrant smuggling and human trafficking networks.”

That letter was a response to one issued earlier by UN special rapporteurs and experts, who had cited widespread detention of Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers, gender-based violence against migrants and refugees amounting to rape in some cases, deportations of refugees and asylum seekers back to their countries of origin, and other violations.

While the briefing document offers implicit praise for Egypt’s controversial asylum law—the first of its kind in the region—it flags “concerns requiring particular attention” in its implementation, chief among them the absence of an explicit non-refoulement provision, a cornerstone of international refugee law, along with the need to ensure a smooth transition from the system previously administered by UNHCR to the new national framework.

The document’s negative findings also cover what it describes as “unequal treatment of certain religious minorities and non-believers,” as well as restrictions on civil society, freedom of expression, and press freedom; citing two petitions filed by the Journalists Syndicate seeking the release of 17 detained journalists, fifteen of whom had already exceeded the legal limits for pretrial detention, with two more held in custody on separate cases.

Broadly, the criticisms filed under “challenges” repeat those from the briefing document accompanying the loan’s first tranche—also unpublished—which additionally raised concerns about continued death sentences, so-called “transnational repression” (a term coined by rights organizations to describe the targeting of human rights defenders abroad), and the continued absence of legislation criminalizing violence against women.

What marvelous achievements!

Alongside the criticism, the document repeatedly inflates minor official measures into evidence of human rights progress—among them the contested new Criminal Procedure Law, which has drawn extensive criticism, including from the Commission itself in the first-tranche briefing obtained by Al Manassa in January, which made no mention of the parliamentary elections held the preceding November.

Among such “achievements” credited to Egyptian authorities in the second-tranche document is a reduction in executions. The document states that “Amnesty International’s reporting points to a broadly positive trend of declining execution rates in Egypt compared to the exceptionally high levels recorded in 2020 (107 cases), which is worth noting,” adding that “while the number of executions in Egypt remains a cause for concern, the figures recorded in 2024 and 2025 were considerably lower, at 13 and 23 cases respectively.”

The Commission’s praise covered measures Egyptian authorities had merely begun, not completed

Sherif Azer, programs director at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms and a visiting professor of international law, told Al Manassa that the drop “may look real set against 2020, when Egypt ranked among the world’s highest-executing states. But measuring against 2020 creates a misleadingly positive picture. Measured against 2023, when executions fell to just 8 cases, 2024 and 2025 actually mark a reversal…executions climbing back up.”

The document also praised Article 22 of the new criminal procedure law, “which will allow, for the first time, reconciliation with a victim’s heirs in certain homicide cases to serve as legal grounds for sentence reduction,” and called for suspending executions as a first step toward a formal moratorium and eventual abolition.

The document projects that the new code, once in effect this October, will lead to the release of detainees who have exceeded two years in pretrial detention, following a reduction of the maximum pretrial detention period from two years to eighteen months.

But according to Azer, the new law does nothing to stop the practice of rotating defendants through successive new cases to keep them detained indefinitely, circumventing the legal cap altogether.

The document welcomed the release of 3,202 detainees, including blogger and journalist Mohamed Oxygen and political activists Sherif El-Roubi and Nermeen Hussein, as well as the lifting of a travel ban on Hoda Abdel Wahab, executive director of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession.

Even so, the Commission acknowledged that the same release period saw new arrests, continued “rotation” of detainees, and travel bans and asset freezes imposed on some individuals even after their release.

Participation trophy

The Commission’s praise in the second-tranche document extends to measures Egyptian authorities have merely begun, not completed — such as a new National Human Rights Strategy, expected, per the document, to be presented to the President later this year, after the previous strategy expires this August.

Despite no official announcement to this effect, the document claims extensive consultations have taken place “across the country, including Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailiya, Port Said, and Minya,” involving civil society actors and independent experts. It states that the new strategy is expected to incorporate all the recommendations Egypt accepted during its 2025 Universal Periodic Review.

The original National Human Rights Strategy, launched in September 2021 under the President’s patronage, faced criticism at the time; most notably from Amnesty International, which called it “a deeply misleading picture” that “completely overlooks patterns of ongoing or past human rights violations” and “fails to acknowledge the role of security forces and other state actors, including prosecutors and judges, in ordering, instigating or committing violations.”

The document also credited three family-law bills submitted to parliament by the government as achievements, despite none having passed — a characterization criticized by Niveen Ebeid, executive director of the New Woman Foundation, who told Al Manassa: “The three family-law bills have not even been officially announced yet. We haven’t seen the text of the Family Fund bill at all. As for the two circulating drafts of the Egyptian Personal Status and the Family Law for Christians, both are unofficial texts, and we don’t know for certain whether they’re final.”

Given the deliberately loose language of the loan agreement, which sets out no real benchmarks for measuring Egypt’s compliance on political and human rights reform, the legitimacy of releasing the second tranche despite these violations remains, in the end, a matter of political calculation and each side’s own reckoning.

A lender can always tighten its conditions when a borrower resists its will, just as it can afford to loosen them at other moments: including when it feels threatened by tens of thousands of impoverished migrants knocking at its door.

At moments like that, questions of democracy and human rights have a way of slipping to the back of the queue.