Macron urged to press ally El-Sisi on rights
President Emmanuel Macron hosts Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah El-Sisi from Sunday for a good three-day state visit with France facing cell phone calls from activists that Egypt should not be "indulged" despite the close alliance between Cairo and Paris. Egypt and France have enjoyed an extremely close relationship under the secular rule of former army basic El-Sisi, with common pursuits in the Middle East and a good shared suspicion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
El-Sisi can dine with French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Sunday night time before having talks with Macron at the Elysee on Monday. Meetings with additional political leaders are because of stretch out into Tuesday. France's close marriage with Egypt at the same time when Cairo stands accused of serial individual rights violations has worried activists, who would like Macron to make the concern central to the discussions. "
French diplomacy has, in the highest levels, lengthy indulged President El-Sisi's brutal repression of any sort of dissent," twelve human rights groupings including Human Rights Look at, Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights said in a good joint statement ahead of his visit. "It is now or under no circumstances for President Macron to operate for his self-declared determination to promote individual rights in Egypt."
"We are astonished that France is certainly rolling out the reddish floor covering for a dictator when there are a lot more than 60,000 prisoners of conscience today in Egypt," Antoine Madelin, foreign advocacy director of the FIDH, advised AFP. El-Sisi found power in 2014 in the wake of the overthrow in 2013 of the president Muhammad Mursi by the armed service which he then led.
Those caught in the crackdown contain Islamist supporters of the ousted Mursi, but likewise leftists and liberals. Concern over El-Sisi's go to to Paris was amplified when three Egyptian activists had been arrested last month following a meeting with foreign ambassadors. Tensions between Ankara and Paris grew additional in the run-up to the visit with Erdogan saying that France should "eliminate" Macron "immediately." France's priority may be the reinforcement of the "strategic partnership" with populous region in the Arab world which is known as a center of "balance" in a volatile location, said the French official.
