Egypt's main opposition, the Islamic Brotherhood, is again in trouble with their country's security that launched a raid on the movement's main bases in Cairo and the Nile Delta on February 14, arresting and detaining 80 of its members. Human rights and civil society groups have strongly protested the move.

Egyptian human rights organisations have called upon the Supreme Council of Press (SCP) to comply with the law and not to hinder the publication of the newspaper "Al-Badiel", which has met all provisions for release as set by the law. The legal 40-day period for the announcement of any SCP objection has passed with neither a response nor the approval of a licence for the newspaper.

Egyptian prosecutors on Wednesday (February 7) transferred the files of more than 40 opposition Islamists to a military court on terrorism and money-laundering charges, in a widening crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the group said. The move came a day after Egypt ordered high-ranking Brotherhood leader Khairat el-Shatir, widely believed as a key financier, and an unspecified number of others, to military justice whose rulings cannot be appealed.

Egypt will not end militancy in its Sinai peninsula, where bombs have killed more than 100 people since 2004, until it tackles political and socio-economic grievances there, a report said on Wednesday (31 January). The International Crisis Group said that Egypt's response to bomb attacks that targeted Red Sea tourist resorts had focused almost exclusively on security, rather than on trying to resolve simmering tensions among the Sinai population.

The Free Trade Agreement between the EFTA States and Egypt was signed in Davos, Switzerland on 27 January 2007. The Agreement covers trade in industrial products, including fish and other marine products, and processed agricultural products. In addition, individual EFTA States and Egypt concluded bilateral agreements on basic agricultural products, which form part of the instruments creating the free trade area.

Sudanese refugee community leaders are claiming that their living conditions in the Egyptian capital are worse than ever, one year after scores of their members were killed by Egyptian troops. The precise number of Sudanese refugees living in Egypt is not known, however observers put the number between one and three million.

Reporters Without Borders has repeated an appeal for the release of blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman - known as Kareem Amer - who has been held in custody for six weeks after posting articles critical of Islam on his blog

In simultaneous predawn raids, Egyptian police on Thursday (14 December 2006) arrested 17 senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood and rounded up at least 140 students on suspicion of being linked to this banned nonviolent organization following a protest at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, Human Rights Watch said today (18 December 2006). The Egyptian authorities have arrested at least 1,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in a crackdown that began in March.

"Hanadi" was a teenager when she was sold into a short-term marriage by her father. "When I was 14, my father told me I was to be married to a man from Saudi Arabia," said Hanadi, who did not want to use her real name. "Later on, I discovered that my father and the man had agreed I would stay with him for a month, until he returned home [to Saudi Arabia] at the end of the summer.”

On 8 November 2006, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Alexandria extended the detention of Egyptian blogger Abdel Karim Suliman Amer, also known as Kareem Amer, for an additional 15 days. This follows an original 7 November decision to hold him for four days pending investigation. HRinfo considers his detention to be a violation of his right to hold and express opinions without interference, stipulated in the Egyptian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Egypt is a party.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) is very concerned about the aggressive campaign being waged against Dr. Souad Saleh, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the Azhar University, following her publicly stating her opinion on the Niquab (the Islamic full body veil), saying it is not compulsory in Islam. Her statement angered many fundamentalists, some of whom have called for the "shedding of her blood".

The poor in Egypt's heaving capital city, Cairo, are increasingly turning to selling cheap products in the street as a means to survive despite its limitations, say specialists. "We have a 'street society' in Egypt. So when families need extra money to survive, street selling is one of the easiest ways to get it,"said Dr Sarah Loza, a sociologist who runs SPAAC, a social policy NGO in Cairo. Street vendors have become a major part of Egypt's large 'informal sector' - unregistered employment without taxes or benefits - which some experts say makes up around 30 per cent of the national economy.

Instead of looking exclusively at international policies affecting refugees, the research also considered domestic policies and how they determine the identities, opportunities and welfare of asylum seekers. The contradictions between these policies and their actual implementation were considered, which included looking closely at the role of international, local and community-based actors.

For the seventh year running, a mysterious black cloud has appeared over Cairo, triggering serious health concerns for the polluted city's 16-million residents. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, which cause serious health risks above certain levels, have reached record heights in the city, from the banks of the Nile, past the industrial suburbs of the delta and even in the desert areas.

A full- time Primary Education Specialist is required for a period of two years with the possibility of follow-up activities over the final two years of this project to support Egypt’s Ministry of Education (MOE) in its efforts to enhance the quality and relevance of primary education.

The Program Officer will be responsible for developing, monitoring and evaluating the Ford Foundation’s work in the field of Sexuality and Reproductive Health (SRH) in the Middle East and North Africa region, with special focus on Egypt and Palestine

In the period since the beginning of the 1990s, CODESRIA has been at the forefront of the quest to harness the efforts of African scholars in both extending the frontiers of knowledge production around issues of gender, and doing so in a manner that ensures that for as many scholars as are active in its networks and at other African sites of scholarly work, gender is integrated into their frames of analyses.

The Program Officer will be responsible for developing, monitoring and evaluating the Ford Foundation’s work in the field of Sexuality and Reproductive Health (SRH) in the Middle East and North Africa region, with special focus on Egypt and Palestine. The current portfolio of initiatives and grants focuses primarily on reproductive health policy reform and reproductive rights and falls under the Foundation’s Asset Building and Community Development program.

Many journalists and opposition leaders are opposing a new law approved by parliament this week. They say the law fails to protect editors and reporters from imprisonment for so-called press violations. "The passage of this law actually represents a slight deterioration (of press freedom)," Hisham Kassem, vice-chairman of the leading independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm told IPS.

Leandro Despouy, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights' Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, on Friday expressed "serious concern" over a recently passed Egyptian judicial reforms bill. Despouy urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak not to sign the law, but instead to send the bill back to parliament for "re-discussion ... with the full participation of the Judges' Club and experts in constitutional law, in order to allow the Parliament to adopt a considerably improved version of the law which guarantees the proper functioning of an independent judiciary."