by SOFIAN PHILIP NACEUR
While authorities continue mass deportations to Sudan, a new asylum law could set a precedent in the region
Egypt is currently pressing ahead with the adoption of an asylum law. Although it is unclear whether it will actually be adopted, the situation of people on the move in the country is likely to remain disastrous in either scenario. The regime continues to respond to the arrival of Sudanese refugees with mass deportations to the war-torn country. The EU, meanwhile, is once again expanding its migration and military cooperation with Cairo and backs Egypt’s struggling economy with loans and grants, this time pursued to reduce irregular arrivals of people in Crete but also to keep el-Sisi’s regime in line for its role in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
To the surprise of many observers, the Defence and National Security Committee in Egypt’s House of Representatives,the lower house of parliament,approved a draft asylum bill in late October 2024, followed by the parliament adopting the law only a few weeks later. The government drafted the controversial legislation back in 2023. The text itself, however, remained undisclosed until October.
The draft law paves the way for transferring refugee status determination (RSD) from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to Egypt’s government ? with potentially far-reaching consequences. “It remains unclear how the law will affect asylum procedures in Egypt”, explains Mohamed Lotfy, Director of the Cairo-based human rights organization Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF). “Registration, RSD, and protection are to be transferred from UNHCR to a new governmental Permanent Committee for Refugee Affairs, but there is no clarity at all about how a transition period would look like or what exactly UNHCR’s role would be after the law is adopted”, he told the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Despite Egypt’s ratification of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention in 1981, it is not the Egyptian state but only the Egypt branch of UNHCR that processes asylum applications in the country, grants people a refugee status, issues corresponding IDs, and ? at least on paper ? provides emergency assistance to refugees and asylum seekers. In a 1954 memorandum of understanding with the UNHCR, Egyptian authorities agreed to consider status IDs issued by UNHCR as proof of identity and to refrain from deporting people in the possession of those IDs. Nevertheless, people registered with UNHCR are denied access to education, the public health system and the formal labour market.
In other words: “The government is generally not concerned with the affairs and lives of refugees unless it involves security issues”, reads a paper by the migration researchers Prof. Dr. Gerda Heck and Elena Habersky of the American University in Cairo. If the government’s current draft law is ratified, this would certainly change.
Formalizing Deportation
The bill now grants refugees the right to education and access to the labour market for the very first time. However, “the law appears to prioritize security considerations over refugee protection, potentially undermining the right to asylum”, warns ECRF Director Lotfy. “The text contains broadly worded provisions concerning ‘acts that may affect national security or public order’. This vague language grants excessive discretion to the new committee responsible for determining refugee status, leaving the door open for arbitrary denials”, he explains.
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