Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

He told Joe Stork of HRW some years ago: “I didn’t start in human rights. I started as a Communist in an underground organization. I was tortured in 1983. Under torture I had to give a lot of information. I was turned into a wreck of a human being. A small example: each time I had a meal of torture, there was the sound of a bell. Since then, whenever I hear the sound of a bell my body shakes. At that time I made a decision that it was no use to have political activity without dealing with human rights. I was sentenced to five years in prison. During this period I studied law. I left jail in 1989, November I think. By December I was a member of the Bar, and active in the Lawyers’ Syndicate. After two years as an apprentice, I started volunteer work on issues of freedoms and rights. The first time was during the Kafr al-Dawwar site of major textile industries strikes in 1994, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’s apostasy case.”

In the same 2007 conversation Seif’ reflected on the state of human rights activism in Egypt at that time.

“Our greatest accomplishment is that rights issues are part of the domestic agenda, and in the state, in their discourse, in academic research, in the media, and the legal profession. We managed to create a social consensus against torture. That didn’t exist 10 years ago. The Communists would say secretly, ‘It doesn’t matter if Islamists are tortured.’ And the Islamists would say, ‘Why not torture communists?’ In the last five years you don’t hear this from anyone. The government created the National Council for Human Rights – responding to external pressures, for cosmetic purposes, but also responding to the situation in the country. The acceptance of several sectors of the Egyptian society to have foreign monitoring of elections, or monitoring by rights groups, this is now a demand of most political currents. The quantity of complaints that citizens make to rights groups, I don’t think the groups suffer from any lack of work! All organizations, no matter how new, have a problem of excessive expectations in terms of their capacity. This is despite all the counter-propaganda the government puts out with the help of others – like underground Communist organizations that see us as some kind of American clone. They are very dear friends, whom I also defend of course. And when I go to defend them, they don’t object.”