On November 5, 2024, the European Peace Facility (EPF) announced the adoption of a measure by the EU Council (by CFSP Decision 2024/2843) to grant a €20 million assistance package to the Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF).
This extraordinary measure, reads the communiqué released by the EPF and Art.1(2) of the Decision, is intended to “contribute to strengthening the capacities of the Egyptian Armed Forces to enhance the national security and stability of the Arab Republic of Egypt, as well as to enhance the protection of civilians. The assistance measure is to allow the Egyptian Armed Forces to strengthen its territorial control capabilities, and to better respond to security threats across the territory of Egypt, particularly in the western region”
The Commission specified that the measure, while representing an ad hoc intervention, was conceived under the framework of the EU-Egypt Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership announced on March 17, and “demonstrates the importance the EU attaches to the EU-Egypt Partnership.”
What weapons will Egypt receive, and who produces them?
The text of Decision CFSP 2024/2843 is more explicit about the contents of the assistance to the EAF, specifying that the €20 million contribution is intended to cover “supplies and services, including training” at the request of the EAF themselves, while specifying that only materials classified as “non lethal”- including light armored vehicles and Class I UAVs (drones), mobile ground radar for patrol activities, and night visibility enhancement devices- will be purchased through the funding (Art.1(3)).
Interestingly, the Council has designated a specific arms manufacturer for the materials that will be covered by the assistance package announced on November 5: the French DCI group, which the EPF frequently recurs to for the supply of defense systems to third countries (most recently, Jordan, Côte d'Ivoire, and Somalia).
DPI has a strong relationship with Egypt: in 2023 it provided the Egyptian navy with three ships for search and rescue (SAR) operations, in partnership with Civipol and Couach, as part of a migration cooperation program that also included the provision of training and other resources worth more than 12 million euros from EU funds to the armed forces of Egypt and other countries. The group appears to have consolidated relations with the EAF at least since 2016, when it provided a training program for a FREMM ship purchased by the Egyptian navy.
Supporting the army “demonstrates the importance the EU attaches to the Egypt Partnership”
While we do not know the expected timeline for the provision of the assistance package to the EAF, we do know that a first tranche of the €7.4 billion macro-financial assistance contribution under the Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership will be disbursed over the next few months.
We have previously argued that, in its design and approval process, the EU-Egypt Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership represents a further undemocratic setback in EU-Egypt cooperation, and it is not in line with the principles of transparency and respect for human rights. The agreement takes the form of a bailout operation lacking any political strategy of medium- and long-term sustainability. Controversial elements abound: procedural irregularities surrounded its approval process, vagueness characterizes the definition of the policy and institutional reforms to which the disbursement of financial assistance is conditioned, and there is an overall lack of transparency concerning the destination of the funds, and the criteria adopted to evaluate progress in several human rights areas for which the Union usually sets benchmarks in the context of similar agreements.
An untransparent agreement
From a human rights angle, the new assistance measure launched by the Council and promoted through the EPF concerns us even more because it has as its primary and direct beneficiary the EAF- an apparatus that notoriously operates outside of all criteria of legality and proportionality under the banner of the “war on terror,” as exemplified by the gross human rights violations in Sinai, a region where the rule of law and the most basic rights have been virtually suspended with the beginning of the presidential security campaign launched in 2014.
How has the Council assessed that the same Armed Forces that have for years committed crimes such as the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the forced relocation of entire villages in North Sinai, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of dissidents and suspects, will be able to use the resources made available to them to “improve the security of civilians in security operations”?
Articles 4,5,6 outline the responsibility of the EAF to use military aid provided under the Nov. 5 package in compliance with international law and human rights law, indicating the possibility of suspending the agreement in case of violations of legal obligations on their side. The Decision designates the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy as responsible in overseeing the implementation of the agreement, and the compliance of the EAF's actions under the agreement with international humanitarian and human rights law. While these criteria would seem to represent a measure of protection for the population of the areas affected by military operations, the applicability of the monitoring parameters might undermine their effectiveness: the EAF have been operating for years under a regime of impunity guaranteed by the absence of independent oversight and with the government’s endorsement. Moreover, it is unclear if (and how) the High Representative will concretely be able to monitor the situation on the ground in the Western Desert region, given that the securitarian policies surrounding the el Sisi government's “security operations” prevent, by law or in practice, foreign representatives, journalists, and civil society organizations from accessing the affected areas.
What human rights violations might be committed by EAF in the Western Desert?
The Decision explicitly refers to security operations near the Libyan-Egyptian border, a territory situated on the migration route through Egypt to Libya. The same area was the scene of horrendous massacres of civilians during Operation SIRLI, when Egyptian armed forces used French intelligence to target “smugglers”- many of whom appear to have been civilians involved in the informal economic sector for sustenance- in the Western Desert and kill them by shelling, a crime sanctioned by humanitarian law for which no one to date has been tried in court. There is no guarantee that the newly announced €20 million package will not be used for new “SIRLI operations.”
Furthermore, we consider the classification of some of the materials described in the assistance package as “non-lethal” to be potentially problematic. Irrespective of their designation as “non-lethal”, the use of identification and surveillance devices by a state apparatus operating outside of all criteria of legality and proportionality fuels internal repression and exposes civilians and dissidents to gross human rights violations. Additionally, in the case of light armored vehicles, the lethal use of similar vehicles has been documented in serious incidents of repression of peaceful protests such as the Maspero massacre, demonstrating the fallacy of the distinction between lethal and non-lethal weapons.
The Egyptian Armed Forces remain the main obstacle to the functioning of democratic institutions, the freedom of the civic sphere, and the recovery of the national economy because of their predatory interference in each of these areas. The disbursement of 20 million worth of military aid announced by the EPF directly contributes to the perpetuation of impunity, authoritarianism, and violations of the rights of migrant and civilian people in conflict areas in Egypt. And it casts the doubt, as grave as it is plausible, that this financial package represents yet another reward from the EU to the Egyptian armed forces for their role as watchdogs in the externalization of European borders.
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