Crackdown in Cairo

News in Brief

There has been a serious and rapid deterioration of the human rights situation in Egypt, a coalition of 15 international NGOs told the UN human rights council in early March, including ‘repeated excessive use of force, including lethal force, by the security forces, leading to the death of hundreds of protesters’.

Officially, 650 civilians died during the clearing of just one pro-Morsi sit-in in Cairo last August, in Rabaa al-Adaweya Square. An independent monitoring group, Wiki Thawra, puts the true death toll at 969.