Violence against women

Women who stood shoulder to shoulder with men during the 2011 Tahrir Square protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak found their position in society undermined almost immediately. The parliamentary quota for women was removed without debate and a promised female vice-president failed to materialise, amid what political commentator Moushira Khattab called a "radical anti-feminist sentiment". Morsi threatened but stopped short of decriminalising Egypt's practice of female genital mutilation, carried out on almost three-quarters of Egyptian girls, making it clear he would not tackle an issue he called "a family matter".

“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

A decade after the US invasion of Iraq, only one of the straw-man arguments for going to war remains standing: “We did it for democracy and women’s rights."

The African Commission on Human and People’s Rights has handed down a decision in a case concerning violence against four women journalists during a protest. The Commission found that the state of Egypt failed to protect four women journalists from violence and in doing so violated their human rights including rights to equality and non-discrimination, right to dignity and protection from cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and their right to express and disseminate opinions within the law.