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In a joint letter, 19 organisations called on US president Joe Biden to secure progress on human rights issues before meeting with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27). The coalition called on Biden to insist on the release of Egyptian political prisoners, the lifting of unlawful blocks on news sites, and the respect and protection of prisoners’ right to be free from torture and other ill-treatment as pre-requisites, among others, for any bilateral meeting with al-Sisi.

MENA Rights Group joins Access Now, the government of Catalonia and 36 other organisations in endorsing the Geneva Declaration on Targeted Surveillance and Human Rights. The declaration condemns the increasing use of surveillance technologies to target and harass those excercising their rights, and calls on governments to implement a moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing and use of targeted digital surveillance technologies, until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place.

MENA Rights Group joins a coalition of NGOs in calling on Member States of the UN General Assembly to sign on to a cross-regional joint statement on reprisals at the 77th session of the UNGA Third Committee.

Three years after the arrest of Egyptian human rights lawyer Mohamed el-Baqer and Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abdel Fattah, MENA Rights Group joins a global coalition of more than 40 organisations calling for their immediate release.

In a joint statement published on September 26, 2022, Human Rights Watch, Legal Agenda, Amnesty International, and MENA Rights Group affirmed that the Lebanese authorities should transfer the prosecution of security force members charged in the torture and murder of a Syrian refugee from inherently unfair military courts to the ordinary criminal courts.

MENA Rights Group joins organisations and individuals in calling on Egypt to immediately and unconditionally release human rights defender Sherif Al Rouby and the tens of thousands of others wrongfully detained.

People standing up for human rights in Saudi Arabia face increasingly lengthy prison sentences, including decades of arbitrary detention for expressing their views on social media, Right Livelihood warned the UN Human Rights Council in a joint statement with ALQST for Human Rights and MENA Rights Group on Monday.

The Lebanese State Security arrested the Syrian refugee Bashar Abdel Saoud on 30 August 2022. Abdel Saoud was tortured to death by a number of officers and soldiers. The victim’s photo, which shows clear signs of torture on his body, was leaked and spread over social media platforms. While several press reports confirmed that Bashar […]

The human rights movement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has paid a heavy price for the unlimited and unconditional support provided by the United Kingdom and United States to repressive governments across the region. The recent visit of US President Joe Biden has reinforced the practice of international relations that prioritises […]

Following the sentencing of Saudi women's rights activist and academic Salma al-Shehab to 34 years in prison as a result of her activity on Twitter, MENA Rights Group joins 34 other organisations calling for sustained international pressure on Saudi Arabia to immediately and unconditionally release al-Shehab.

The undersigned civil society organizations working in Arabic-speaking countries demand the immediate release of Meta’s India human rights impact assessment (HRIA) and BSR’s independent review of Meta’s content moderation in Palestine. Meta contracted with BSR, a third-party assessor, “to conduct a thorough examination to determine whether Facebook’s content moderation in Arabic and Hebrew, including its […]

MENA Rights Group joins more than 150 civil society organisations calling on the international community to unequivocally condemn Israel’s targeting of Palestinian civil society and take effective measures to end all other actions that deny Palestinians their inalienable human rights.