Amira Mikhail is the co-founder and director of Eshhad, a nonprofit that is focused on the protection of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. Amira has worked as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) and as a legal fellow at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. She is a graduate of Washington College of Law at American University, where she worked with the UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic, the Human Rights Brief, and as a research assistant to the Chairperson of the United Nations Committee against Torture. She has worked with the International Refugee Assistance Project and the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch and has been published on a variety of legal and social issues relating to Egypt and the Middle East. After graduating from Covenant College, Amira worked for five years in Cairo, Egypt where she worked at the American University in Cairo. She has also worked in Jordan and India.
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Last night, Egyptian authorities arrested and detained Malek Adly, a prominent human rights lawyer who, as this piece was written, was being investigated by police. He is accused of inciting the protests that took place on April 25.
The U.S. government has sent a letter to all 50 states asking them to align state and local laws with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the United States and other nations negotiated with Iran. This post provides relevant background, explains why the U.S. government asked for rather than mandated and end to state sanctions related to Iran, and suggests that the JCPOA might eventually require the U.S.
Last Thursday’s hearing by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs made clear that the Republicans in Congress are still steaming about the Obama administration’s narrowing of Congress’s recent restrictions to the U.S. Visa Waiver Program (VWP) related to Iran. But as usual when the President narrows a statutory program related to foreign relations, Congress has only itself to blame.
Don’t look now, but the Egyptian parliament has been busy over the past two weeks solidifying the power of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
The other day, military prosecutors in Egypt opened an investigation into Hossam Bahgat, founder and previous director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a (quite effective) investigative journalist.
The idea of European prosecutors investigating military activity in other parts of the world scares the pants off of many US and Israeli policymakers. But right now, anyway, one person who should be watching European universal jurisdiction cases particularly closely is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.