Egypt ex-VP slams rights situation under al-Sisi regime

ISTANBUL

Mohamed ElBaradei, who briefly served as vice-president following Egypt’s 2013 military coup, has decried the country’s human rights situation under President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi's rule.

In a Thursday tweet, ElBaradei, who served as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 2009, said that Egypt’s poor human rights situation was “hurting the country’s future”.

Currently based in Vienna, ElBaradei named several political activists who, he alleged, had recently been targeted by the al-Sisi regime.

"Engineer Yahya Hussein Abdul Hadi was arrested and his whereabouts remain unknown, while Ashraf Shehata and Mustapha al-Najjar have both disappeared,” ElBaradei tweeted.

He went on to note that Abdul Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a candidate in Egypt’s 2012 presidential poll, along with activists Shadi Ghazali Harb and Hazem Abdel-Azim, was currently languishing in solitary confinement.

ElBaradei, who has been a vocal critic of the al-Sisi regime since leaving the country in late 2013, described the above-mentioned activists as “only a few of countless examples”.

The Egyptian authorities have yet to comment on ElBaradei's assertions.

Egypt’s human rights record is the target of frequent criticism by both local and international rights groups.

The authorities, for their part, typically dismiss the criticisms as “baseless”.