The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies is dismayed by the Biden administration’s decision, communicated to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday September 11, that it would release the $320 million of FY 2023 Foreign Military Financing (FMF) subjected to human rights conditions to the government of Egypt. This will be the first time that Egypt will receive the full $1.3 billion appropriation under the Biden administration, even though human rights conditions placed on a portion of the assistance by Congress have not been met.
By brazenly disregarding human rights conditions imposed by Congress on U.S. military assistance to Egypt the Biden administration is providing precisely the kind of “blank check” for Egypt’s authoritarian leader, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, that President Biden had promised to eschew, when he was running for office in 2020.
In previous years, the administration had withheld part of this assistance because of Egypt’s failure to meet the human rights conditions stipulated by Congress in such areas as strengthening the rule of law and protecting basic freedoms. Despite the Egyptian government continuing to abuse detention procedures and to imprison people for exercising their right to freedom of expression, or for seeking to participate in the political process, the administration waived the human rights conditions on $225 million of the appropriated funds on national security grounds. Secretary of State Blinken certified that Egypt was making “clear and consistent progress in releasing political prisoners,” and “providing detainees with due process of law” to release the remaining $95 million.
The State Department has briefed reporters that it took the decision to release the conditioned aid “in recognition of Cairo’s efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.” For months the Biden administration has failed to hold Israel accountable for its wholesale disregard of international humanitarian law in its assault on Gaza in which over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them women and children. The administration is complicit in a plausible genocide in Gaza because it continues to supply Israel with the weapons that are being used to kill Palestinian civilians indiscriminately, and because it fails to use its influence over Israel, by for example suspending arms shipments, in order to persuade Israel to comply with the ceasefire agreement essential to bringing about the release of remaining Israeli hostages and providing much needed humanitarian assistance to over 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza.
Perversely, the Biden administration is rewarding Egypt for its cooperation in the U.S. government’s failed efforts to bring a speedy end to the conflict in Gaza. In this way, it is compounding its human rights failures in Palestine with another failure in Egypt.
The U.S. Congress still has the ability to block the release of the conditioned FMF funds. CIHRS joins with partners in Washington D.C, in calling for it to fulfill its oversight duties by blocking the delivery of these funds. Furthermore, Congress has the ability to strengthen the human rights conditionality on FY 2025 FMF funds and to increase the amount of FMF subject to conditions. Congress should seize these opportunities to send a clear message to the Egyptian government that human rights conditions matter in determining the value and quality of the bilateral relationship. Members of Congress are aware that Egypt has recently been implicated in bribing a leading senator, former Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, convicted in July 2024 of entering into a conspiracy to serve as an agent of the Egyptian government. Egypt’s egregious efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy by corruption demonstrate the corrosive effects of cooperation with an authoritarian government. Now is an important moment for Congress to reassert the need for the government of Egypt to bring an end to more than ten years of severe repression under President Sisi.
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