Category: Blog

4th Annual WCCTUR Conference: Workers and Social Resistance

Posted on By 3arabawy

The Workers’ Coordinating Committee for Trade Union Rights (WCCTUR) is to hold its fourth annual conference, titled “Workers and Social Resistance,” this Friday 11 May at the Cairo Press Syndicate.

Friday Conference Timetable:
10am to 10:30am: Registration
10:30am to 10:45am: Opening note, by Saud Omar of the WCCTUR
10:45am to 12:45pm: First session
“The Attack on the Right to Health Insurance”
The session will be chaired by Dr. Abdel Galil Mustafa, and coordinated by Muhammad Abdel Salam. The speakers will include: Dr. Ra’ouf Hamed and Dr. Shoukri Azer
12:45pm to 1:45pm: Break
1:45pm to 3:30pm: The Second Session:
“Labor Protests: Indications and Results”
The session will be chaired by Magdi Helmi, and coordinated by Ad-Doustour labor correspondent Mustafa Bassiouny. Speakers will include labor lawyer Khaled Ali. Workers who took part in the recent wave of strikes will also give their testimonies.
3:30pm to 4:30pm: Lunch
4:30pm to 6pm: The Third Session:
“The Right to Fair Wage”
The session will be chaired by Dr. Ibrahim el-‘Eissawi, and coordinated by Elhami el-Merghani. Speakers will include Ahmad el-Naggar.
6pm: Recommendations
The organizers will draft the recommendations of the conference into a statement… followed by honoring the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services, and labor leaders Ahmad Khedr and Abdel Moneim Karawya.

Moneim and MB detainees to start hunger-strike tomorrow

Posted on By 3arabawy

Blogojournalist Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, and the 18 detained MB students are to start an open-ended hunger-strike tomorrow Tuesday, if the Prosecutor extends their detention, after being subject to humiliating treatment in Mahkoum Tora Prison.

In a statement sent out of prison, the detainees complained from:

1-Confinement for 23 hours a day in overcrowded cells where an average of 22 inmates are kept in 10×22 feet cells infested with bugs with only one extremely filthy bathroom to share.
2-Numerous assaults by criminal prisoners and thugs, including sexual harassment and verbal abuse.
3-Use of illegal drugs inside prison cells by criminals and drug dealers, and the produced smoke which makes it very difficult to even breath an already polluted air, in addition to extremely foul language and screaming all night by intoxicated thugs which became a source of psychological agony.
4-Poor medical care in handling life threatening and contagious medical conditions, including skin diseases and HIV. Four cases of chicken pox and measles were denied appropriate care and hospital admission.
The statement also complained that the students who were mostly preparing for their final exams, surrendered their school books to the prison administration in protest, since it became impossible for them to study in such awful environment.

Moneim is to be interrogated by the Prosecutor tomorrow, at the Tagammu el-Khames Prosecution’s Office, Nasr City. Please express your solidarity by showing up tomorrow 10am in front of the office.

If you can’t show up, it’d be still great to at least write one follow up posting on his case, and circulate information among your contacts and friends, inside Egypt and abroad, about the abuses against Moneim and the Egyptian political detainees languishing in Mubarak’s gulag.

State Security torture 8 Assiut student activists

Posted on By 3arabawy

From Ikhwan Web:

The Egyptian State Security Police forces detained on Friday, May, 4, 2007, eight Muslim Brotherhood students from Al-Azhar University, while they were going to the mosque to perform Friday Prayer; later, another group of students were arrested from their dorm. All the detained students were taken to the Assiut State Security Service headquarters; a State Security Police officer, Ashraf Abul Makarem, tortured the students using electric shocks, and ordered them to take off their clothes and bead them on their naked bodied while showering them with a flurry of insults and treated them inhumanely.
They appeared after that before Assiut prosecution on Saturday evening, May, 5, 2007, after remaining under custody and torture of the State Security Police for thirty six hours.