The Refugees Platform in Egypt (RPE) issues a paper on the European Union’s decision, last June, to fund the Egyptian Coast Guard with 80 million euros, an amount that will be paid in two phases with the aim of “purchasing maritime border control equipment”, but there are no details about what the equipment is and how it is going to be used, and without setting clear indicators to ensure accountability for potential human rights violations and protect the rights of people on the move.

The paper notes that the EU has previously provided funding to strengthen migration management in Egypt, but in fact, the funds and support of the EU have contributed to tightening restrictions on irregular migration in Egypt, by using law No. 82 of 2016, the law in which among several things, it criminalizes aiding irregular migrants and contradicts with other laws that expand the circle of human rights violations against people on the move. RPE paper also criticizes the EU’s demand to enhance cooperation between Egypt and Libya in the field of migration, especially since the two countries have a long record of violations of the rights of migrants and refugees.

In the paper, incidents are tracked on the Egyptian side’s sea and land borders, and falsification of official figures related to the sinking of migrant boats, or the announcement of deaths of people who later turned out to be alive and being held in unknown places, and the violations that follow arbitrary arrest from medical negligence and forced deportation, and the paper also adds another monitoring of the refugee situation inside the country.

Paper contents:

• Ambiguous and worrying funds
• EU cooperates with authoritarian regimes to suppress migration movements
• Egypt’s successive failures in search and rescue operations and in providing the necessary protection to migrants and refugees, both at the borders and within the country
• More funds without transparency, independent monitoring mechanisms, or prior assessments of their impact on migrants’ rights
• Recommendations to (the EC, the EU and its Member States, and the Egyptian government)

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