New | Three years since revolution, Egypt still shackled by human rights woes

Egypt’s military-installed authorities are quashing dissent and trampling on human rights, three years after the revolt which toppled Hosni Mubarak, Amnesty International charged Thursday.

“Egypt has witnessed a series of damaging blows to human rights and state violence on an unprecedented scale over the last seven months,” Amnesty’s Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said in a report, as Egypt prepares to mark on Saturday the anniversary of Mubarak’s overthrow.

“Three years on, the demands of the '25 January Revolution’ for dignity and human rights seem further away than ever.”

She said that unless the authorities changed course, “Egypt is likely to find its jails packed with unlawful detained prisoners and its morgues and hospitals with yet more victims of arbitrary and abusive force by its police”.

Since early 2011, political upheaval in Egypt has unseated two presidents, Mubarak and his successor Mohammed Mursi, and unleashed unrest that has deeply polarised the Arab world’s most populated country.

Sahraoui pointed out the authorities have also jailed the architects of the anti-Mubarak revolt, adding that “repression and impunity” had become the order of the day.

In November, the authorities passed a new protest law that bans all but police-sanctioned rallies, after which several leaders of the anti-Mubarak revolt were jailed for organising what officials say were unlicenced demonstrations.

Rights groups see the jailing of anti-Mubarak activists Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma, Mohamed Adel and the detention of Alaa Abdel Fattah as a broadening of the government’s crackdown on dissent, which had after Mursi’s ouster targeted only his Islamist supporters.